How to get around the volume problem with AI sales pitches.
Spoiler Alert for Charles Dickens’ 1853 novel Bleak House (skip to the next paragraph if this is too soon). At the end of the book, the decades-long Jarndyce and Jarndycelawsuit that has taken up much of the plot finally resolves. However, in the process legal fees have sucked up all of the estate’s resources, so the only winners are the lawyers on each side. The plaintiffs and defendants get nothing. This was on my mind as I was thinking through this week’s piece. End of spoiler.
In Palo Alto last week, I programmed and hosted the RMN Ascendant Boot Camp. It’s an off-the-record event, so I can’t share specifics. One general idea that came up a few times is that Generative AI will help salespeople create hyper-customized pitches for clients in a fraction of the typical time. More than once, I asked about the people on the other side of the AI-generated pitches. “What about the volume problem where buyers get overwhelmed by orders of magnitude more pitches than in the pre-AI years?” Nobody had an answer.
Lowering the cost of submissions increases attention taxes on recipients in an inequitable way.
It’s worth taking a moment to imagine this. If you work in almost any sort of business, then you get hundreds of emails per day (many hundreds in my case) and spend gobs of time sifting through them to figure out which you must read, which you want to read, and which you can ignore. Now imagine that every one of these emails is personalized to you, your preferences, your aversions. It’s not just email: it’s also ads that you see online, web content, podcast ads. I avoid TikTok because the algorithm is so addictively personalized, but in the AI-amplified sales process your whole personal and professional world will be like that. The famous scenes in Minority Report (2002) look like amateur hour in a Generative AI world where a wave of inbound commercial communications turns into a tsunami.
Even if each pitch is of the highest possible quality, the quantitative problem will still be maddening.
The economic incentives for digital businesses are around creation, not filtering. This has been the case for as long as there has been a commercial internet. I’ve written before about Clay Shirky’s notion of “filter failure” as a better descriptor than “information overload,” and at one point I had hope that technology might be able to help. But I’m feeling more pessimistic these days.
The AI overwhelm problem is not science fiction.
It’s already happening in academia, where journal editors have become inundated with AI slop submissions, which has practical consequences, as we can see in this Forbes piece:
There is a significant human cost, however. The journal doubled its deputy editors from six to eleven and nearly doubled its senior editors from roughly 30 to 60. All of this is volunteer labor, unpaid academics donating time to maintain scientific quality. When those academics are weeding out AI slop they are not using their time to teach classes, conduct research, or serve their professions.
It’s also happening with submissions to academic conferences. For example, the keynote at the latest Association for Computational Linguistics conference talked about a “success catastrophe” because the conference received so many submissions:
ACL 2026 drew more than 10,500 submissions, with 55% coming from China and 16% from the US, and the ARR May 2026 cycle that followed reached over 17,000 submissions. For comparison, the first EMNLP in 1996 had 14 papers.
Plus, as I’ve written before, thousands upon thousands of self-published and AI-generated books are flooding Amazon and other marketplaces, which is diluting the market and revenue for human authors.
A lit match in the darkness…
There are ways to combat the tsunami of AI-generated communications, but they require aggressive rethinking and new forms of intermediation—that is, sticking barriers between senders and recipients that equalize the cost to both.
For example, raising the costs of submission will lower the number of submissions even if the cost is trivial: say, $5.00 to submit a paper to an academic journal or conference. The more submissions that come in, the greater the cost will become to submit. There could also be alternative ways to submit a piece, for example, via nomination from a trusted member of an academic peer group.
For too many business pitches—whether AI- or human- or hybrid-generated—we can adapt a solution I hypothesized years ago in Email: a Modest Proposal (2017); simply creating a flexible, postage-stamp-like cost to send an email would eradicate spam:
If I want people to be able to reach me easily, then I’ll only charge a penny. On the other hand, if I want to minimize the attention tax I have to pay every time I receive an email, then I’ll charge a higher fee: ten cents, a quarter, a dollar… although only after I’ve paid for my own sent emails first.
So that buyers don’t turn inbound pitches into personal profit centers, an ethical approach would be to set up a cost to submit that goes directly to one of a handful of legitimate charities of the recipient’s choice.
Some people’s attention is worth more than $5.00. If the price to submit to such a person is higher (say, $1,000), then another approach would be a) to refund the submission cost for legitimate calls on the recipient’s attention that don’t work out, or b) to credit the cost of submission to the project if it gets a green light.
The live alternative…
As an events producer, much of this is good news for me. The best way to dodge the tsunami of AI-personalized inbounds is to meet people face to face and get to know them. That way, when those people email you, there’s context and a reason for you to click. This is why live events will increase in value.
By the way, when I say “face to face,” I do not mean Zoom. The day is approaching when we won’t know if the person on the other end of a videoconference is really a person.
The best way to deal with digital and AI overwhelm is to go analog.
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* Image Prompt: “Make this crowd scene a black and white drawing where the people are all in silhouette.”
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