When I’m interviewing execs at AI-driven tech companies, which I do almost daily, I often feel like a parent forced to tell my child the Tooth Fairy isn’t real.
The CEO or founder will ask me, eyes hopeful, whether I’ve “seen anyone else doing anything like we’re doing” – but I don’t think they’re ready to hear an honest response.
Because my answer, nine times out of ten, is “yes.”
No new ideas?
At the end of a typical briefing, I always ask my interview subject if there’s anything else they want to discuss that I didn’t bring up. The two responses I get most often are, one, to find out what AI trends I’m seeing and, two, whether their platform resembles anything I’ve seen before.
In the eight months that I’ve been writing about the online advertising space, I’ve had countless founders tell me their offering is truly unique.
Sure, it might not be a one-to-one replica of another offering. But, at this point, I’ve seen an agentic platform guided by natural-language prompts being employed in pretty much every imaginable context, from creative versioning to analytics.
To be fair, in an industry where tech evolves at such a rapid rate, something like a fully agentic campaign execution platform can sound like a pipe dream one day and be industry standard six months later.
The same is true for dashboard interfaces. A few years ago, marketers would’ve gone wild for a straightforward way to see campaign performance numbers, like which creative is performing best and among which demographics.
These days, though, marketers have their choice of platforms to automate their A/B testing, so they don’t even need to analyze creative performance manually; it’s done for them.
But the irony of such rapid evolution, perhaps, is that no one appears quite able to believe that once-complex processes are now so simple, so founders convince themselves that they’re the only ones making real progress.
To boldly go where (supposedly) no company has gone before
Since joining AdExchanger back in April, I’ve been pitched on “the first agentic commerce platform,” “the first agentic ad agency,” “the first agent-native media execution platform” and “the first agent-based system managing the entire campaign life cycle.” To list just a few.
If you’re curious, I’m pretty sure none of them was actually “the first.” It’s like an ongoing saga of the boy who cried wolf … and, so far, I haven’t seen the wolf.
But, recently, at an off-the-record holiday dinner, the person I was chatting with asked me a crucial follow-up question: What makes a memorable AI company stand out from the rest?
Now, I’m a journalist, not a media planner, so take my answer with a grain of salt.
But what stands out to me isn’t the aesthetic of the dashboard (probably pretty good) or the number of A/B tests the AI model can run (probably a heck of a lot).
The best way to stand out in an increasingly agentic landscape is with a strong human team that knows how to effectively explain what a product does and how to use it.
The heart of the matter
I came into this industry as a writer without a background in tech. It was a challenge, certainly, but also an asset: My inexperience made me particularly discerning of people’s communication skills.
And it quickly became evident that one of the most important things for a tech company to have is a team that knows how to drop the jargon and explain things quickly and succinctly.
You don’t need a forty-minute demo. You don’t need seventeen three-letter acronyms (please). You need to give clear examples, use words that exist outside of our funky little industry and sound like a human being while doing it.
It’s the difference between a professor who reads every lecture directly from their notes and a professor who cracks jokes and shares spontaneous insights.
The truth is, it doesn’t matter whether your technology is entirely original – because it almost certainly isn’t! But your clients, colleagues and even your competition will remember a team that values human connection and communication, and doesn’t just spout buzzwords.
This journalist will certainly remember, anyway.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. This column is part of a series of perspectives from AdExchanger’s editorial team.
