Author: remap_content_admin

An AI agent is a type of software typically driven by generative AI (and/or advanced machine learning, in some cases) that gets a specific kind of work done, with limited human oversight.

AI agents differ from older software models (e.g. SaaS) by offering more adaptive, non-tedious workflows and minimal UX – providing the minimum of user interface needed to accept text, audio, or visual inputs. They can enrich user inputs by automatically gathering and assembling useful information from other methods, such as APIs, web scrapers, integration platforms, or even other AI agents.

Similarly, an agent’s outputs may happen partially or entirely outside of a user interface traditionally associated with a software user interface.

At the core of AI agent is its ability to make a sequence of decisions in real time using generative AI, adapting its responses based on context and goals. As such, an AI agent can be modeled on a human role (e.g. a “bookkeeper agent”). By the same token, a team of AI agents (a swarm) can emulate a collaborative team of worker roles.

A note on “feedback loops”: AI agents may be designed to improve decision-making based on user interaction with their own outputs but this is a non-essential trait that may be not cost-effective to design and build.

Generative AI (Gen AI) is a type of AI that uses an counterintuitively large data sets to train itself to behave in a way that allows it to understand and emulate human data. Hence the misguided name “large language models” (LLMs). It’s misguided because Generative AI doesn’t actually speak or understand language it is exposed to; it merely recognizes statistical patterns once it translates language (or imagery, sound, etc) into data.

Gen AI is inherently incapable of autonomous thought but if properly designed, can give the impression of thought in response to human prompts.

Generative AI is a useful technology but difficult to leverage efficiently due to its the high cost of creation, training, and hosting. Also problematic is that companies which produce Generative AI products are tempted to violate copyright laws to fulfll their need to supply “training data”, appropriating content that doesn’t belong to them.

Nevertheless, Gen AI and innovations built on top of it (eg Agentic AI) are disruptive and significant.

Agentic describes a near autonomous, goal-directed software solution chiefly comprised of an AI Agent or ideally, a team thereof. Agentic AI is closely associated in practice with Generative AI, though in theory teams of AI Agents could be built with other forms of machine learning.

It is important to note that no agentic solution is actually autonomous; what’s important ultimately is its ability to accomplish tasks with minimal human supervision.

I want to expand on my latest dictionary entry – “Lead magnet”.

Caveat: as with every other definition, there’s an implication of quality. For example, when I define marketing, the scope of the definition is good marketing, not crappy marketing.

So I’m interesting in defining quality lead magnets not the crap you instantly toss in the trash – but let’s think about the latter.

A lead magnet should be very difficult to make

The standard lead magnet formula will sound familiar: it’s a cheatsheet, a 1-pager how-to, a template, a swipe list. It’s just good enough to pique curiosity.

You look at it for a few minutes and then, “meh”, you delete it. Then you get a dozen emails in automated sequence, then you’re on a list, and so on.

At some point within the last 5 years, this got very old.

The format may be fine, of course; a concise how-to manual, for example – nothing wrong with that. But the standard formula I refer to is marked by a conspicuous lack of effort.

If you created it in one day, let alone one sitting, it’s not a lead magnet. Don’t be fooled by course creators and marketing gurus who lead you down the “it’s easy path”.

A lead magnet is not for list-building

Part of the problem is a misconception as to the fundamental purpose of a lead magnet – that it’s a email list-building tool, a “list magnet”.

Maybe 10 years ago that was true, but that concept is very shaky now.

What’s the point of an email list anyway? for 99.99% of people in B2B solutions, an email list is a marketing channel that leads to sales of solutions. Granted: for a select few, the list itself is the product – Venkat, for example. But I’ve never seen such a person lure customers (ie. paid Subtack subscribers) with a traditional lead magnet.

Keep in mind, this is just my opinion. Someone could easily counter it; “of course it’s a good idea to build your list – why wouldn’t you use a lead magnet for that?”.

In my opinion, you wouldn’t because it’s a wasted opportunity to create value – more on that below but first let’s round out the list of what a lead magnet is not.

We’ll make the two premises above the starting point of this list, then add some even more important considerations:

What a lead magnet is not

• Something easy to make
• A list-building tool
• Something that you can’t sell on its own
• Something unrelated to your solution
• Something another business could create

The three points I tacked on are even more important than the first two.

Their connecting thread is this: a lead magnet is a product; your product.

It may not have the same scope as one of your paid products, but it must still have product-like impact and value creation potential.

When you create a lead magnet, think like a product manager, not a marketer.

Or like a drug dealer – does a drug dealer give away something the potential customer will simply throw away? No; they give something that is at least as good as the real thing, if not better. It’s only the quantity that’s limited.

BTW, there’s a finer point there; consider whether a lead magnet pertains to a single product – not to just any offer (product or service) your business provides.

So we design the lead magnet as a truncated version of whatever product it’s meant to inform people of,  interest people in, and sell people on.

In a sense, a lead magnet is an extension of the product itself.

A free product (or service) whose purpose is to make leads consider purchasing an related product or service that creates even more value.

(What it is not: a way to build a mailing list)

A compound name derived from portmanteau’ing “rant” and “banter”. Long-winded comments, posts, or recordings with the energy of a rant but with more enthusiasm than opposition or bitterness.

When you open Instagram, Facebook has 10 million ads to show you. But it chooses just one, to begin with. How? Step by step. To vastly oversimplify for illustrative purposes, Facebook chains targeting filters together in a step-by-step sequence: gender, age, location, hobbies, bidding/budget, etc. The point I want to stress is that the filters don’t happen all at once; they’re sequential.

This is how code interpreter depicts it:

By the way, this is also how prompting an LLM works when you chain prompts together – a process of elimination is employed. Thus you can deliver more personalized content, analysis, or summarization.

In a way, chained filters depicted in the graphic are a form of personalization, but a crude one. I make 4 different ads and use the platform to show them to 4 different kinds of people. Pretty limited.

But over the last 10 years, there are ever more “dynamic” ads – dynamically personalized in real-time based on viewer data. The classic example is the shopping cart-data-as-ad: you put shoes in the cart on one site but don’t buy yet, then you see a massive ad for them on another. That’s called retargeting.

But these are also crude as a form of personalization, in one part because they rely heavily on ethically questionable data mining. But in another part because they offer limited inputs. Or they are just wrong.

You might have seen ads like Home prices dropping in [your city name]”, where the city named is an hour’s drive away.

Generative AI-enhanced ads, on the other hand, let advertisers pull in almost infinite inputs to dynamically personalize an ad to an individual.

It also allows the user to help create the ad they want to see, or customize, in real time using what we now call “prompting”.

If businesses can achieve that, they can leapfrog over the current regime of personal data mining and offer intriguing, noninvasive, and more personalized ads.

BTW, wherever I say ‘ad’, you can also swap in the word ‘content’.

A CEO should be careful about when to use storytelling – resist its allure.

“The really important issues of this world are ultimately decided by the story that grabs the most attention and is repeated most often”
Annette Simmons, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

Let’s file one this under “sad but true”. In the car ride of life, do you prefer a new story, or an often repeated one?

Simmons’ thinking echoes David Gergen, who once introduced a communications strategy called “Story of the Day” to his new boss, US President Ronald Reagan. That’s mass communications thinking and it’s dated.

Anyway, the best storyteller I ever met was … drumroll…

it depends. (Sorry)

It depends on:

• the storyteller’s background
• the audience
• the story itself
• how it’s told

You might say that the goal isn’t to be the best storyteller but the right storyteller.

And good timing doesn’t hurt 🤷‍♂️

There’s also something else: knowing when and whether to tell a story in the first place. BTW, maybe we overuse the word storytelling and its synonym, narrative?

In “Seduced by Story”, Peter Brooks sardonically points out that the “Starr Report”, the official investigation into the conduct of Bill Clinton preceding his impeachment, contained this headline above its findings:

“The Narrative.”

Wait, is it a congressional report related to a consequential legal matter – or is it a story? Also, shouldn’t judge and jury decide the story, not a prosecutor?

How about sometimes we offer something else – facts, opinions, research, code, flavor. And others can make that into a story if they wish.

The best storyteller I ever met (ie the best one for me) was – is – very judicious about when to tell a story. I’ll reveal his other storytelling qualities in the next one.

Here’s the fact: it’s not in the DSM.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, though; it just means it’s hard to diagnose as a distinct mental disorder.

Impostor syndrome exists, instead, as a psychological experience – patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors where the through-line is anxiety, even pre-emptive anxiety.

“If I frame it that way, people will think I’m _______”.

Yes, this is normal and yes, it means – congratulations – you’re not a sociopath. But let’s be real, it also cuts your revenue, ultimately.

And impostor syndrome can be a group experience too – people at companies feed one another narratives, or just self-deprecating jokes, that validate doubts. This makes it easy:

• take refuge in the “features” of your product, rather than go hard on unique value proposition
• emphasize how you’re the same as competitors; you belong, really
• indulge in aloof, indirect messaging
• say too much or try to hard to prove your worth

Actually, this is why firms end up hiring an external strategist – for the latter, making a strong claim about how the company is different is emotionally uncomplicated.

Message Maps has the same effect. Given enough information in discovery, it crafts a positioning strategy that leapfrogs right over your company’s impostor syndrome and stakes your flag in the ground. Which is essential for a tool that rapidly creates sales and marketing messaging to help grow revenue.

Purely as a matter of wordsmithing, you have to give “The Big Con” a 10/10 for its title. As a book title it has an allure to it that almost feels like a promise.

The promise is that you’ll get some blend of James Elroy detective-fiction and investigative tech business journalism by Azeem Azar. The Big Con isn’t as gripping as James Elroy but comes pretty close to being investigative journalism. It presents a ton of data that shows a messy entanglement of large consulting firms (McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, EY – and dozens of smaller replicants) with our governments and our economies. This has an inevitable outcome: the crushing of innovation.

It’s war on entrepreneurialism.

But you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater – there are many brilliant and innovative consultants out there at firms like these.

So maybe “the Big Con” is more abstract than specific consulting firms or even the consulting industry as a whole  – maybe it’s also a conceptual problem.

Maybe what’s most pernicious is the idea itself that you need vast resources, time, meetings, even pedigrees, etc., to “strategize”.

Again, what does strategy really mean? Formally, strategy means a set of ideas that inspire a change to a position of advantage over a significant period of time. Informally, strategy means, to “be smart about things”.

And the way to be smart about things is to spend time asking good questions and putting effort into answering them. But that doesn’t need to take many months, meetings, or MBAs – message maps is based on the theory that you can find strategy with a couple of hours of dedicated focus.