If there is one thing this moment of techno-negativity—from the rejection of Flock Security cameras to the distrust of AI companies gobbling up data—tells us, it’s that people hate feeling watched. You could put the brightest minds of our generation in a room and task them with coming up with the worst possible idea to meet this moment, and they wouldn’t be able to come up with a better idea than the startup Outlit, which promises an AI agent over every person’s shoulder.
As spotted by Futurism, Outlit is pitching businesses on near-24/7 customer surveillance to spot potential opportunities for upselling, retention, and bringing back lost leads. “Every company will soon assign an AI agent to every customer to watch their every move,” founder Josh Earle told Futurism.
A quick note for Outlit, but also for every other executive and aspiring entrepreneur, on that general line of thinking: Even if you believe the most likely outcome for the future is something nightmare-ish and awful, you don’t have to work to bring it to fruition. You don’t need to be the one who makes the torment nexus. In fact, we can collectively agree not to build it, rather than nihilistically insisting that if we don’t, someone else will, so let’s get this bread.
Anyway. On the company’s website, it says that it “continuously monitors the customers” on behalf of the business, basically taking the existing data-trawling operations that lots of businesses already rely on to their logical conclusion. Per Futurism’s conversation with the founder, the company plans to have agents scan through internal records like a person’s call logs with company representatives, as well as external sources like a customer’s social media posts and details about their life. That’s all combined to create individual profiles for customers, along with action plans on how to keep them coming back.
Earle told the outlet that businesses “need to know what’s going on with [their customers] — from every call that they’ve had, from every interaction, from every LinkedIn.” Do they, though? There’s enough research out there to suggest that data mining can help a business with customer retention (whether it actually gets the customer a better outcome is much less obvious), but we’ve gotta be operating on the absolute fringes of fractional improvement if we’re actively monitoring a person’s social posts for sales opportunities.
Outlit’s website does promise that customer data is secure and anonymized, but what does “anonymized” mean, exactly, when you’re building intel files on individuals? “There’s nothing that we’re doing that’s illegal, so we’re within our right to be able to monitor signals,” Earle told Futurism, and it’s always good when you have to assure people that whatever the morality of your business, it’s perfectly legal.
