The moat AI can't copy
This is what AI will never replace. The good news is that every company can do it.
I was searching for a caterer for my neighbourhood dinner last month.
Found a promising one online. Food looks good, lots of reviews. The CTA is to text them on WhatsApp. So I sent a message.
I had a few specific questions. The chat continued to send me links to their menu and more forms to fill. When I stopped responding, they continued to follow up with barrages of messages.
I realized I was speaking to a bot. And the company has no idea who I am. I'm probably just another row in their CRM.
The weird thing about modern businesses
One of the weirdest things in business to me is how far the business is to their customers.
When you have an interest in a product and chat with customer service, you're not actually talking to an employee of the company who made it. A bot talks to you. When you comment on a social media post, it's not a real person replying to you, a bot does.
We say marketing is important. That our customers are #1 priority. But then we hand things off to a bot or a contracted customer service agency.
How can you make great stuff for your customers, if you don't have a relationship with them?
The answer is you can't.
LLMs can scrape Reddit and forums for problems people have and then suggest to you the types of products to create. But how true are these things? We know people don't tell the full truth, especially not on social media.
This is one of the appeals of direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands.
The reason DTC brands like Over, Nattome, Nateskin (all of which we've invited to speak at Underdog Con) do well is that when they started, they did 90% of their sales direct-to-consumer.
By choosing to go direct-to-consumer, they were always close to their customers. They knew who their customers were and what those people liked.
And by cutting out the middleman (retailers, etc.) they can take the savings and pour them back into improving their product.
The moat AI cannot copy is the relationship.
When I spoke to Jon Lai a few days ago, I was interested to learn about his AI systems. 15 minutes into the chat, I realized the true secret why his brands have exploded in the market is that they have always kept a close relationship with their customers.
For example, even with quite sophisticated AI, the company has real human customer support staff. Their AI systems take some load off with pre-qualifying and segmenting users. But there's always someone real talking to customers.
Yes, a bot can reply faster. But it'll never replace what customers want in the first place – to be heard, seen, and understood.
See the AI workflow running Atomic Group’s RM8m ad machine
Jon will reveal his AI workflow that runs the paid advertising across his brands under Atomic Group – Nattome, Kingwell Heartio, The Perfect Derma, and more, next week at Underdog AI Con.
The group spends RM600,000 - RM700,000 on ads each month, making up to a RM8 million ad spend per year. At that kind of scale, AI workflows provide serious leverage.
I was mindblown when Jon shared his AI workflow with me. And I think you'll gain lots of insights from it too.