The secret to ensuring that your company doesn’t lose customers? Constant, AI agent-powered corporate surveillance.
That’s according to Josh Earle and Leo Paz, a pair of founders behind a vibe-coded Silicon Valley startup called Outlit. The venture argues that “AI customer surveillance” is the future of business-to-business sales. (“Our thesis,” as Earle put it in a disarmingly straightforward pitch email, is that “every company will soon assign an AI agent to every customer to watch their every move.”)
“The whole surveillance component came up because that’s the way we feel companies can serve their customers,” Earle told Futurism in an interview. “It’s really the only way we see this is going to play out.”
Outlit’s goal is to amass as much real-time information about a company’s clients as possible. According to Earle, agents trawl internal records like call logs and sales data as well as external information like social media posts and the websites of people’s employers; they then compile that data into detailed customer profiles, often complete with “actionables” like outreach recommendations and sales guidance. Outlit argues this level of insight will help companies prevent “churn” — business jargon for lost customers — or find opportunities to upsell.
“Every company is looking to automate so much customer work with agents, but there’s a whole issue of data freshness, real-time understanding of customers,” Earle said. “What we found was that if we were able to basically monitor a customer across every internal and external signal, we could actually create a real-time understanding, and this would include monitoring all the activity under product, under [customer relationship management], under LinkedIn, under website — everything.”
Outlit, which is backed by the incubator Y Combinator, is yet to be publicly released. And as it stands, it’s working mostly with business-to-business software companies, and says it isn’t in the business of monitoring individual consumers — nor does it want to be, according to Earle.
“We probably wouldn’t be going business-to-consumer,” Earle told us. “The data would suck anyway.”
But while Outlit isn’t sending agents to follow random shoppers around the web, said Earle, the goal is to “be monitoring every external data piece from a company, and the internal as well… they need to know what’s going on with [their customers] — from every call that they’ve had, from every interaction, from every LinkedIn.”
The resulting product, as described by Earle, is basically a detailed intelligence dossier.
“It’s one page, and it’s always updating,” said the founder, “and it’s all of everything we can find on them at all times.”
