Radical Thoughts on LLMs for Marketing and Communication

For technology marketers, using artificial intelligence (AI) in our writing is de rigueur. Some of this expectation comes from the need to do more with less, and piecing off tasks to a large language model (LLM) speeds tasks to completion.

And in the software industry and other sectors, CEOs and executive teams feel pressure to move AI more and more centrally into their product stack or operations tech stacks. LLM orchstration is enabling multiple LLMs to be integrated to perform more complex business processes.

LLM In The Middle

For person-to-person communication, the technology has sure evolved. LLMs have language mechanics down cold. Vertical applications may also take the LLM deeper into domain-specific language and concepts as Document Crunch does with construction contracts or Veolia has in wastewater treatment.

LLM Hallucinations vs the Illusion of Communication

And yes, I am looking right now at a screen offering me AI help writing this post. In my work for B2B SaaS software and industrial clients, I'm not using AI to write things from scratch, though.

I may use it to repurpose content for different audiences, with revisions. Or maybe I'll condense transcribed conversations with AI. Why the reticence to use AI as a first step?

Part of the reason is basic marketing and sales mechanics. As an illustration ... I do a lot of cold calling. It's hard work, but I know from past lives that I will meet fantastic people like this, and some of them will become long-term friends and clients.

Would I rely on a bot to do this outreach? Of course not. Because the goal is not to just send a supply signal--"I have this service for sale,"--but to align myself with a person at the other end of a fiber optic cable, or sometimes in person. My main goal is to ask questions at first and learn--understand and then be understood. I suppose you could just have a chatbot ask questions and formulate a proposed transaction, but that's more of a configurator app than a sales process.

In my sales training (late 1990s Power to Influence), it's drilled into you that sales is a transfer of emotion. Connecting with that prospect involves multiple dynamics, including being someone the prospect will easily talk to. Most enterprise sales executives must meet hard requirements for how qualified a prospect is before a deal can progress to the next stage of a sales process. If that's you, the qualifying factors I still have from memory may look familiar.

• Need--What is the prospect initially looking or asking for, and how does this relate to their actual need or ideal solution

• Want--Not just what they want in terms of a solution, but what mental or emotional states are important to them

• Wound--What pain are they feeling--business pain, emotional pain like fears, regret or anger

• Authority--Position in the decision process, a complex matter with long sales cycles with multiple purchaser, gatekeeper, specifier and influencer roles

• Money--Are they financially qualified to buy, and does their budget align with costs

At the very least, there are standards about how much information you have on the deal before it can, say, move from lead to opportunity or through percentages.

How much of that do you want to leave to the LLM? You could rely on AI to harvest notes from a probing conversation, but how much nuance have we lost in translation? Each of us will have picked up on things from the call--the pregnant pause before mentioning an internal gatekeeper or the cat head popping up over their keyboard. These may make it into your own notes of the call, but you are also getting to know that person and the nature of their existence.

And that's important. Because I'll tell you a secret, one that may be even more unpopular than my healthy skepticism of LLMs.

Making the sale, not making the sale--it pales in importance compared to this underlying process of connecting with each other. The adage is that if you die, they'll post your job opening before your obituary. We are all so much more than our day gig. But it goes beyond that.

Martin Buber, whose I and Thou is so challenging Buber may have benefited from an LLM, gets us to the deeper narrative.

“Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other ... Secretly and bashfully he watches for a yes which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another.”

― Martin Buber, I and Thou

The Ghost In The Machine

"When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them."

― Martin Buber, I and Thou

An LLM may emulate human speech, but it is still a machine. Our corporeal bodies may be machines--poorly-designed, prone to systemic, acute and chronic issues and decay but machines nonetheless.

But we are not.

Philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously criticized Rene Descartes' idea of the mind as separate from body and that we are the "ghost in the machine" by suggesting the mind is just a "spectral machine."

“Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine," writes Ryle in The Concept of Mind. "He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.”

Fine, says Catholic Theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who in Phenomenon of Man makes a compelling case that a fundamental element of this evolution of higher primates is the ability to envision the mind of the other--of another person, of God. And in both religion and philosophical movements like open individualism, there is the glimmer of recognition of a shared higher consciousness that unites us.

The outcome we are working for, in business or anywhere else, is to be seen, known and understood. This is the foundation that underpins all other communication. When I look back at clients, people I've worked for and with, it is the shared experiences journeys that I remember. And the largest part of this shared journey is really discovery, which in a B2B setting may be focused on tactical issues, but also involves ramping up a shared understanding of the problem to be solved.

Not only are we both ghosts, but deep down, we are the same ghost. That's the level that even business communication must start from. The machine is a tool we may use at the periphery.