Something Weird Happened When I Mentioned AI Sales Tools Recently
Welcome to the Dave vs. Startups.
Something weird happened when I posted about AI sales tools recently…
I got a bunch of responses from people saying they were wary of having an AI tool respond to sales opportunities automatically.
But here's what someone pointed out to me (and I can't claim full credit for this insight):
Over time, the AI will only get better at answering emails and responding to sales opportunities.
Yes, of course, the AI is going to make mistakes at first.
But, you know what…
Throwing a new person to do the same role will probably lead to mistakes the first couple of times they do it, too.
So when you really think about it, the performance is actually very comparable.
So we have a common theme here:
AI that makes mistakes initially
Humans that make mistakes initially, too.
But here's where it gets interesting…
The difference is that one's a human and the other's a machine (obvious, I know).
And I think most of us are way more tolerant of human error because we're human ourselves and we make errors.
When a new salesperson sends a crappy first email, we're like "Oh, they're still learning, give them time."
But when AI sends a bad email reply, we immediately think the whole system is broken.
The reality is that AI error isn't actually a technical error.
It's just a bad response until you fine-tune it and coach it on how to make it better.
Same as you'd do with a human employee.
What I find fascinating is how we have completely different standards for AI versus people.
We expect perfection from AI immediately, but we give humans months or even years to get good at something.
The irony is that AI actually improves much faster than humans do.
You can coach an AI system and see improvements in days or weeks.
Train a human on the same task, and it might take months to see the same level of improvement.
I think this bias is going to cost a lot of businesses opportunities.
While you're waiting for the perfect AI solution, your competitors are using imperfect AI that's getting better every week.
Human error feels normal. AI error feels scary.
But the data doesn't support treating them differently.
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An uncomfortable truth for many founders to hear:
High turnover is rarely a people problem, it’s a broken hiring and onboarding system.
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