The door-to-door salesperson had no leverage. If he was at your door, he wasn’t at anyone else’s door. Every minute you spent with him was a minute he had to spend with you. While it was a tough gig, no one doubted that something was motivating this person enough to put at least as much into the interaction as you were. You might close the door in the face of the person who rang your bell, but at some level, you knew that another human was involved.
Spammers play a different scheme. One person can steal the time and attention of a million. It costs them nothing (actually, truly, nothing) to add one more name to the list. The lack of care and discernment comes through in their interactions. They steal attention in bulk and treat it casually. No one feels bad when they delete or filter spam.
In B2B selling and other high-value sales calls, the seller puts in a lot of effort. A custom presentation deck, useful spreadsheets, even a flight across the country to meet in person. That effort is expected, because the buyer sees their attention as valuable.
And now, here come AI agents. These are spammers disguised as door-to-door salespeople. They know your name, your history, your details–and they present a pitch that looks and feels as though a human spent a lot of time thinking about it and focusing on the buyer’s needs and desires.
But it’s done on a huge scale. It’s like seine fishing. A huge net is set to catch as many fish as possible, with no regard for the mass destruction it causes as a result.
Our instinct is to respect the work of a pitch that took more effort to create than it will cost us to consume (that’s why books are more respected than blog posts!). But AI agents, working at high speed to churn through the small amount of trust and attention we have left, upend that expectation.
Attention and trust continue their dance, and our choices determine how we’ll show up in the marketplace. Burning trust to get attention rarely pays off.