two Avanceé business cards and a NFC ring

continued thoughts from the previously posted Refining the Contact Points

One of the ways am using the Humane AiPin is in the form of a networking assistant. For several events, have used the AiPin to make a note of contacts by copying the business card into its notes and then adding notes as context needs. Not a pure CRM, but suitable enough to remember context and reach back out to persons. Unfortunately, email has not yet been implemented, so some of the (non-text) messaging process is neutered. That said, it is showing a part of friction that seems to be present with a lot of small businesses who wish to grow their network and service capacity.

Generally, once you’ve received contact information, it’s customary to reach out to ensure that the initial connection is one worth keeping. Many of us might do this easily with familiar and impromptu connections with a “hey there, just reaching out” kind of message. In this business context, the push is similar, though there is some means of record keeping so that you aren’t doing this too often. There’s sometimes a threshold (how many times to reach out, how often till you expect to hear back, etc.) also established. This might be an internal number until some sales/communications strategy is developed. This might be some alignment to marketing/business development practices, or capped by regulatory compliance.

Where the AiPin, and really most of us, seem to have issue here is in the friction of being responsive. Whether this is making that outreach or responding, we sometimes encounter friction to communication. Sometimes, it’s the deluge of other messages asking for our attention - so we miss messages, skip for later, or flag/label but procrastinate. Or maybe we do make that communication, but the response we are looking for doesn’t happen (or happen in a time window that we’d expect). For this, we can only make guesses at what kept someone from being responsive - while also monitoring our own expectations and timing to whatever the message needs to convey.

Sales would tell you things such as frequency, multi-contact points, and even being intrusive would be ways to mitigate the negative characteristics of responsiveness. While some industries and individuals are built for this, one of the most apparent things about this connected age is that everyone and everything is vying for limited attention. Individual and collective bandwidth is constantly being stretched, but not increased. Where much about generating a connection seems to fail is in putting more stuff into a pipe which just is not able to take it.

So, what do we do? There’s suggestions such as automation, warm/cold contacts, in-person vs remote, and frequency hopping which might be useful - if not stressful. There’s some hope that some of the “AI wrappers” would be able to better automate the harder bits, freeing the personalized experience for those connections which come to a particular level. This is some/most of the hope of using the AiPin, simplifying some of the experience of connecting and synthesizing such that being intentional is a characteristic of moving forward, not an accident or force.

Intentionality - we are all filtering each communication, each experience, through this lens. And whether we have the capacity or not, being able to respond in kind is a matter of intentionality. And a matter of prioritization. Sometimes these conflict. Sometimes the tooling isn’t able to meet our expectations. We can be agile to a point, but only to a point. At some level, what has worked just doesn’t anymore. And anew route needs to be explored to get the desired connections.