Hacker News Reader

Comment by Haakam21 | Hacker News Reader

This refers to B2B use cases that are live in production. Finding, contacting, and negotiating with vendors is a tedious process in many industries. In the time a human reaches out to 10 vendors, an agent reaches out to 100 or 1000. So it finds deals that a human would not have.

View on HN

But if you hire ten or 100 real humans you have accountability and the same number of contacts per day?

Are logistics companies really that poor so they cannot afford to pay workers wages?

By that logic why send email newsletters when I could hire 10 or 100 people email them manually instead? Obviously there's a cost tradeoff here where it's worth it to have email negotiation in an automated way, but not in a human call center way.

The tradeoff isnt agents vs humans its where humans sit in the loop.

Sure hiring 10–100 humans gives accountability, but reality is it doesn't scale in any comparable way compared to agents in speed, coverage, or responsiveness. The sheer volume agents can pump out(more vendors, more quotes, faster cycles) is the benefit, while humans retain accountability at the decision boundary.

In practice the agent does the gruntwork, and the human gets looped in when confidence is low. Accountability doesnt dissapear, it gets concentrated where it matters most

Once vendors are getting AI spam sent to 1,000 of them and their competitors, they will stop responding and find other sales channels. This won't be sustainable.

Unless they have agents reading those emails and responding ...

Oh I feel like this is already in the making.

Let me create another (Y-combinator backed) startup which will intend on solving this issue haha (/s just kidding)

This is already happening. Also with AgentMail.

wait till you find about B2B procurement marketplaces... ya'll this stuff exists

Reply on news.ycombinator.com