AI startup Outlit pitches always-on AI agents to surveil customers
Gizmodo reports that Outlit, a Y Combinator-backed startup, is pitching businesses on near-24/7 customer surveillance by AI agents; founder Josh Earle told Futurism that “every company will soon assign an AI agent to every customer to watch their every move.” According to the company's website and its founder, those agents would scan internal records such as call logs and interactions alongside external sources like customers' social media posts, building individual profiles plus action plans for retention and upselling. Outlit says customer data is secure and anonymized, but Gizmodo questions what “anonymized” really means when the product builds intelligence files on individuals.
If widely adopted, this kind of tracking would extend customer surveillance from internal records to public social data, potentially deepening public distrust of AI monitoring and drawing regulatory scrutiny.
If there is one thing this moment of techno-negativity—from the rejection of Flock Security cameras to the distrust of AI companies gobbling up data—tells us, it’s that people hate feeling watched. You could put the brightest minds of our generation in a room and task them with coming up with the worst possible idea to meet this moment, and they wouldn’t be able to come up with a better idea than the startup Outlit, which promises an AI agent over every person’s shoulder.
As spotted by Futurism, Outlit is pitching businesses on near-24/7 customer surveillance to spot potential opportunities for upselling, retention, and bringing back lost leads. “Every company will soon assign an AI agent to every customer to watch their every move,” founder Josh Earle told Futurism.
A quick note for Outlit, but also for every other executive and aspiring entrepreneur, on that general line of thinking: Even if you believe the most likely outcome for the future is something nightmare-ish and awful, you don’t have to work to bring it to fruition. You don’t need to be the one who makes the torment nexus. In fact, we can collectively agree not to build it, rather than nihilistically insisting that if we don’t, someone else will, so let’s get this bread.