You may ask — what was this magical, awe-inspiring article that touches men’s hearts and moves them to tears?

It was: “Aegis AI Announces Rebrand To Actuate”, a banal press release about our name-change from two years ago.

There was almost certainly no inspiring content in that article. So why did he write such an email?

Well, he didn’t.

He almost certainly scraped my contact information from a list, and had some type of software automatically populate my name, location, and even a recent article about us into certain variable fields.

This is called a “drip campaign”. We’ve all received hundreds or thousands of these. If you don’t write back, at regular intervals, the software will automatically “drip” you with additional follow up emails until you do.

I’m sure at a certain point, maybe about ten years ago, before they became ubiquitous, drip campaigns were really effective. I remember in business school I had been impressed by an email that looked really personalized from Bain & Company, but come to think of it, the recruiter clearly fed me into her drip campaign software. However, not only are they now ubiquitous, they are ineffective.

Why are they now ineffective? It’s because anyone who is in any sort of buying position now gets dripped dozens to even hundreds of times a day. “Dripping” isn’t restricted to emails either, there’s software that will automatically add, message, and drip LinkedIn members on your behalf, and software that make mass cold-calls much easier.

Most people can now see this type of outreach for what it is — dishonest and inauthentic. It is an effort to mislead someone into believing you’re receiving personalized communications when it is clear that it’s not.

As a result of this, sales is completely broken. Email open rates have never been lower, response rates have never been lower, trust in salespeople has never been lower, and nobody ever wants to answer their phones anymore.

At Actuate, I’ve been coaching our sales team to do the complete opposite. Instead of feeding lists of people into automated drip campaigns and tracking what message copy receives a 2% response rate instead of a 1% response rate (by the way, 80% of those responses will be some permutation of “unsubscribe”), we reach out with well-researched, empathetic, and custom messages. We are exceedingly polite and we can take no for an answer. Because of this, our response rates are easily 10–20x what is usually expected in an automation campaign, and when people get on the phone with us and agree to pilot our solution, the conversion rate from pilot to signed customer is nearly 80%.

Don’t get me wrong, it takes far more effort, but the effort is well worth the reward. Relationships are not transactional, and I can’t think of many things more transactional than feeding a list of contacts into automation and having it shotgun blast prospects on your behalf.

It doesn’t work and it’s destroying sales. Please stop doing it*

*Except our competitors, please keep doing it.

Sonny Tai is the CEO of Actuate, an AI Security Company based in Lower Manhattan

Imagine coming to America as a single mother with two kids on a $12 per hour, H-1B visa sponsored job, and the first car that you buy turns out to be a lemon.

It was a ‘94 Red Oldsmobile Achieva, and mom had spent $6,000; a big chunk of her savings back then. Mom didn’t know any better — and the sketchy used car salesman probably pegged her as an immigrant woman who didn’t know how to take legal recourse, and he was right.

Mom got rid of the Olds, and she ended up buying a brand new, 2001 Saturn for over 3x the price, but that car ended up sticking with us for almost 15 years; I drove it in high school, I took it with me to college and Quantico, then I passed it onto my sister after buying my own car with my Second Lieutenant pay.

At the time, mom struggled with a severe case of information asymmetry. In his 1970 Nobel Prize-winning paper, “The Market For Lemons”, economist George Aklerof observed that the quality of goods in markets with asymmetric information decreases over time, leaving only low-quality products. Handicapped by information asymmetries, customers were unable to distinguish good cars from bad cars, and eager to turn a profit, sellers masked low-quality cars as high-quality ones. Since used cars are often sold “as-is”, the entire industry was failing on both product and service, which poisoned the reputation of the entire industry.

Just like countless customers have been burned by used car salesmen, many security leaders have also become jaded by AI companies who have overpromised and underdelivered. This is again the result of information asymmetry; security professionals are subject matter experts in threat assessments, tactical operations, and the deployment of hardware such as surveillance cameras and access control, but to many, the concept of AI is still a black box — they know that it can work, but they often don’t know why it works and the conditions required for it to work. Because of this information asymmetry, security professionals will either wait for others to take the plunge first or opt-out of adopting AI altogether.

So, what is the solution? AI companies should go the extra mile to facilitate information symmetry by focusing on advisory and support. All too often, companies publish marketing materials extolling the performance of their AI models in an effort to generate buzz, when security professionals would rather vendors invest the resources and effort into building trust and confidence. In our experience, when it comes to AI solutions, while security professionals are interested in things like model accuracy and cost, they increasingly see those as table stakes, and are much more interested about things like:

• How will you support me throughout implementation and production?
• How responsive is your team if technical issues arise, and will they be willing and able to stay on calls with me for as long as it takes to resolve these issues?
• How does your solution integrate with my existing technology, and how does it fit into my existing operations and processes?

These questions above are industry agnostic, and have given rise to companies like Accenture and Wipro that have built billion dollar businesses around services such as Cloud Migration Consulting or SAP Implementation Consulting. However, in physical security, this consulting needs to be provided in-house by the AI company providing the service, since the vendor is usually the only subject matter expert on the deployment of their technology.

The last thing that a security professional wants is for a vendor to drop a new technology in their laps and leave them to fend for themselves. As an example, our engineers will stay on calls with customers for hours at a time to troubleshoot network and camera issues, not only to ensure that our analytics are working as advertised, but to help the customer optimize the capabilities and availability of their existing infrastructure. In doing so, we have been able help create information symmetry and earn the confidence of even the most skeptical stakeholders.

The video analytics industry is currently at a crossroads — on one hand, it has the potential to bring unprecedented efficiencies to physical security operations, but on the other, a massive amount of information asymmetry between AI companies and security professionals leaves many customers skeptical, fearing they may be left holding the bag with a “Lemon AI Deployment”, just like mom was left with the Lemon Oldsmobile 20 years ago.

This is a tough hurdle to overcome, but if we do so — if we can build trust and facilitate information symmetry, together we can make physical security one of the most exciting, innovative, and fastest growing industries of the decade.

When I was in business school, I would scoff at my classmates who were starting companies, thinking: “why would they pay $60,000 per year if they’re not even going to use on-campus recruiting?” (Note: several of my fellow Booth ’15s have become very successful founders, to include Tovala, ExplorER Surgical, and Simple Mills)

Now, as a founder myself, I wish I would have done the same, and this is why:

1. There’s less opportunity cost: Before Aegis AI raised money, I took no salary for a year, and I spent the summer paying our engineers out of pocket. When you start a company in business school — you’re making no money anyway, so you’re not giving up salary that you otherwise would have taken. You have a two year window during which the worst thing that could happen is that your company fails and you graduate with a credential that dramatically increases your earning power.
2. It’s easier to build a team: My co-founder is very talented. However, he is also more risk averse than I am. I highly doubt I could have talked him into ditching a high-paying, post-MBA job to work on a startup with me if he wasn’t still in business school. Not everyone is dead set on Google, McKinsey and Goldman Sachs right after business school. Business school is rife with talented, driven people who want to take the two years to find something they’re really passionate about, and if it doesn’t work out — banking, consulting, and big tech will still be there. It’s the perfect place to find these people and build your team — they’re not golden handcuffed by crazy salaries and options vesting schedules yet.
3. You have full access to the school’s entrepreneurship resources: Business schools want to support entrepreneurs. They often do so with business plan competitions, mentorship, and sometimes even funding. Because my co-founder is a current student, we qualify for the New Venture Challenge, which has a massive prize pool for the winning team that comes in the form of an uncapped SAFE. Over the summer, we also were able to hire a talented intern, who helped with everything ranging from web design to coding and data science (she was a rockstar, I plan to steal her back from Goldman Sachs before she graduates). The university subsidizes half of her salary, which was helpful for a cash-strapped startup.

It takes a village for a startup to succeed. That means, you need to convince people to give you their time, effort, and money. In many ways, it’s much easier to do so while you’re still in business school. If I had to do it over, I’d build Aegis AI as an MBA student, but for now, I’m glad that business school helped me find a hell of a co-founder, and provided us with the resources that we needed early on to figure things out.

Sonny Tai is the CEO and Co-Founder of Aegis AI. Aegis AI builds software that employs computer vision to automatically identify gun threats in existing security camera feeds.