AI Sales Videos and The End of Work as We Know It

One Small Step for SendSpark, One Giant Step for the AI Agent Workforce

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On Monday, I posted a video on LinkedIn that I’d created with AI video personalization startup, SendSpark (get 15% off using my affiliate link here). It’s a software that allows you to record a sales video with an intro like “Hey ‘Watermelon’”, then feed the software a big list of prospect’s first names and website domains. SendSpark will create a video for each of them, that has you saying their name instead of “watermelon,” and shows you scrolling their website while talking.

It’s not perfect. If you know to look for it, you can sometimes see that the mouth isn’t moving exactly as it should to say the name in question. But the voice replication is amazing in every one I’ve created, and the website scrolling, while a fairly simple trick, does wonders for signaling to the viewer that this is a salesperson who is currently researching your company and taking the time to reach out personally. Anecdotally, it seems to be really effective at helping cold emails stand out and get positive replies.

Even so, I imagine this version of the product will be outdated and less effective fairly quickly. When I signed up for my account, I’d assumed I’d be able to customize several inputs in the video (Company Name, for instance). Expanding those customizable “tokens” (in marketing automation parlance) is an obvious next step. Which got me thinking, what does the rest of the road look like for this type of AI video/avatar outbound campaign?

Here’s my guess:

• Stage 1 - Mass production of customization of limited fields in static videos

  We’re here.

• Stage 2 - High volume/unlimited customization of placeholder words in user- recorded video

  In the next stage, tools will allow you to customize a video just like you can customize an email in Hubspot, Marketo, etc... Maybe video platform has to provide list of, say, 25 placeholder words that the user can map to the column headers of the data source. So, they record the video saying “coconut” and map that to Company Name, “tangerine” and map that to Metro Area, “cucumber” and map that to Job Title, and so on.

• Stage 3 - Script-driven mass production of custom videos

  Eventually, tools won’t require the user to record a video for each use case. Instead, during setup, the user would train the software on a bunch of video footage of themselves. Once the tool is trained, the user will be able to just feed it a script of the videos they wanted created, including custom fields for personalizations. This could be paired with a well-trained script-writing bot to remove the need for the user to write each script.

• Stage 4 - Instruction-driven mass personalized video campaigns

  This is really just bringing that external “well-trained script writing bot” from Stage 3 into the video personalization product. After training the video app on minutes to hours of video of you speaking, you can just have a conversation with it about the video campaign you want to launch, to whom, etc…and it can create a unique video for each prospect in your campaign according to those instructions and what it knows about the prospect. Or maybe rather than uploading training videos, the app will lead you through recording a bunch of phrases, making certain facial expressions, etc..?

  

  Another day at the office, err, virtual RoboCMO training center.

• Stage 5 - Autonomous Video Agents

  You have a kickoff meeting with the app’s Virtual You, let it know what your goals are for the quarter, how much compute budget you can spend, and any other parameters, and it executes custom outreach campaigns, including videos, on your behalf ahead of your monthly scheduled check-ins…

• Stage 6 - Autonomous Sales Agents or the People Revolt?

  Eventually, Virtual You is quick, smart, and convincing enough that you trust it to start running the meetings it books. At this stage, Sales (and most of knowledge work?) is about training Virtual You (maybe buying that new “Great Motivator” or “Expert Negotiator” power-up!) to interact with your Virtual Coworkers, Virtual Buyers and Sellers, etc…and get the best results for you.

Orrr, at any point on this journey, people get really sick of watching or talking to AI/miss talking to humans. And the hottest new trend in work, the biggest Sales hack going, becomes meeting real people in real coffee shops, real restaurants, or even…real offices???

Which would last until the mass production of a cost-effective, undetectable, Artificial Human You to attend those tiresome in-persons for you.