Automation vs productivity in outbound - do we know what we want?
One of the more interesting things we have learned while building Causo is that people ask for automation, but what they really want is productivity. Those sound like the same thing but actually aren't.
Ask someone what they want from an AI sales tool and the answer is usually:
“Just find the leads, write the emails and run the outreach for me.”
But the moment the tool actually tries to do that, the questions start: where did this company come from; why does it match my ICP, is this person still working there; where did you find this information; can I change the email; has anything been sent yet?
This is not users being difficult. It is a trust problem. People want to remove the repetitive work. They do not necessarily want to hand over the decisions that can damage their reputation. I think a lot of AI products are automating the wrong part.
In outbound, pressing send is the easiest part. The actual work is: figuring out which companies are genuinely relevant, researching what is happening inside them, finding the right person, verifying that the contact information is real, understanding why they might care right now, writing something that does not look like it came from a mail-merge factory.
Yet most “AI SDRs” focus on sending more emails with fewer humans involved. We took the opposite approach with Causo. The system does the annoying work: searching live sources, cross-checking companies, researching why they fit, finding decision-makers, verifying emails and drafting the outreach.
But you can still see the reasoning, change the targeting, edit the copy and approve what represents you. The goal is not to replace the founder or salesperson, but to help them not spend half the week jumping between Google, LinkedIn, Apollo, Hunter, spreadsheets and Gmail just to send ten decent emails.
Our current product rule is becoming: Automate the labour, not the responsibility.
I suspect this applies well beyond sales. The more public or irreversible an action is, the more control users want. Drafting something is useful. Publishing it without asking is terrifying. Researching options is useful. Making the final decision invisibly is not. Curious how other people think about this.
Do you actually want your AI tools to operate autonomously, or do you mostly want them to prepare better work for you to approve?
Replies
@dawid_baranowski Is trust the real thing missing here not more features?
Causo
@harry_johnson11 didn't say we are shipping more features to get over a lack of trust - it's a process question. A full auto process requires massive amounts of trust that exceed what we can offer - see Gary Tan saying he never reads emails that he believes are full AI. This is an ecosystem problem :)
@dawid_baranowski Would you be okay if it sent emails without asking you first?
Causo
@dawid_baranowski @jack_brown24 Not without asking first, but if my goal was to launch a slop cannon... (idk why one would though)
Causo
@jack_brown24 I personally have extremely few workflows where anything happens on full auto. They tend to be parts of code and design review, but personally I skew always towards more control and I'm not shy about it. The way I run my own outbound emails is by crafting a golden sequence by hand; and then letting AI experiment with specific variants of copy, or to mutate the reference sequence within strict bounds. :)
Causo
This has probably been our biggest lesson building Causo. People want the research, enrichment and writing automated, but they still want to understand why a lead was chosen and control what gets sent. Automate the busywork, not the judgment.
Very interesting post.
I see the same with our users.
We had people ask for AI summaries for longer content and then complain that it was too short…
Seems like a psychological thing above everything.
Thnx for sharing!
Causo
@mazin_assaf thanks Maz!
@dawid_baranowski Do we actually want less work or just less confusion before acting?
Causo
@dawid_baranowski @henry_taylor11 both?
Causo
@henry_taylor11 @ivan_sem Both.
Everyone asks for the tool to just do the whole thing, but the moment it actually does, the trust wavers, and they want to see under the hood. It's not that they changed their mind, it's that full autonomy sounds great right up until it's your name on whatever just went out.
Causo
@johnsongill Exactly. People want the work automated, not the accountability. The second it goes out under your name, you want to know why it was chosen and what it actually says.
This is the right distinction. Most users don’t want full autonomy first. They want better prepared decisions. In outbound especially, AI can do the research, filtering, verification and first draft but the person still needs to own the judgment because their reputation is the thing being sent.
Causo
@nipuntaneja Exactly. The useful part is getting someone 90% of the way there without pretending the last 10% does not matter. In outbound, that last bit is your judgment and your reputation.
@dawid_baranowski When does automation start hurting your personal touch?
Causo
@dawid_baranowski @ali_rehan1 All depends on context. We try to extract as much of it as possible from the user, but it is not always easy.
Causo
@ali_rehan1 to me it's not really a when, it's a 'how' you use automation. My own real life example:
The way I use automation in my own outbound emails is I write a golden standard sequence by hand, per given market segment or ICP. Then, I let my automation vary specific bits of it (eg change subject line, adapt certain parts, vary a sentence in a given range). This lets me preserve a large degree of personalisation.
At the same time, if I were to say "chatGPT pls make email", I would lose all personalisation. It's a balancing act of context provided, as well as parameters that automation is allowed to touch.