Why Your AI Marketing Strategy Needs A Human Touch After All

In a world where artificial intelligence (AI) tools and agents are increasingly feted as the answer to every business problem, San Francisco-based OneShot.ai is pivoting to a different approach. The start-up, launched in 2021, is certainly proud of the technology it has developed to support businesses in their go-to-market (GTM) activities, but it is also convinced that human interventions are critical to driving last-mile success.

I first met OneShot in the autumn of 2023, shortly after it had secured additional funding to pursue an aggressive growth strategy. Almost two years later, the business is about to unveil the latest version of its GTM platform, with an emphasis on the human contribution to sales and marketing activity.

“AI alone is not delivering the results that businesses hoped for,” says Gautam Rishi, CEO of OneShot. “Everyone has access to it and everyone is using it, so getting better results than your competitors is impossible,” says Rishi, whose background is in leading sales teams and who co-founded the business with Peda Pola, a former Salesforce executive.

It’s a complaint echoed by Eli Burstein, president of software company Capstone, one early adopter of OneShot’s new technology following a period more dependent on an AI-dominated approach. “Since bringing human specialists into the loop, our pipeline has exploded across multiple GTM channels,” Burstein says. “It’s changed the game.”

OneShot’s original value proposition was based on an analysis engine that sourced data from the business’s customer relationship management (CRM) system as well as from external resources such as LinkedIn profiles, search engine results and financial reports. This engine created a target list of potential prospects for the business’s sales teams, and also automatically crafted personalized content that teams could use to reach out to these prospects.

The problem, OneShot has come to realise, is that this isn’t enough. “AI gets you 70% of the way there,” says Rishi. “To get all the way, you need to combine AI with the right humans at the right time.”

OneShot’s subtle pivot therefore aims to deliver that combination. Its platform still provides customers with the ability to automate target identification and content creation. But critically, it also creates an execution plan for GTM activity, recommending which tasks should be automated and which require human intervention. In addition, for the latter tasks, the platform can allocate the work to individual staff within the business or recommend specific recruits externally; customers can then hire these workers through the platform on a freelance basis.

This emphasis on the human touch is an interesting move in an industry where the move towards automation has seemed inexorable. One recent report found that 75% of companies making business-to-business sales have now implemented AI and automation tools in their GTM strategies or intend to do so.

However, Rishi insists that businesses who go too far down this route will be disappointed with the results they get. “OneShot began as an AI-only outbound platform in 2023 and while we saw promising results, it became clear that AI alone wasn’t enough,” he says. “ChatGPT exploded, email performance tanked and digital workers weren’t delivering.”

Instead, OneShot believes, the right approach today is a strategy that combines AI efficiency and productivity with expert insight from humans. “Are you really going to let AI spend your $20,000 a month advertising budget with zero oversight?”, he asks. “Are robots going to make effective cold calls?”

OneShot’s recent growth suggests its new approach resonates with customers. The business has now hit $1 million in annual recurring revenues, with growth coming largely from referrals.

Karl May, the founder of Join Digital, the networking business, is one customer that has come to the company following disillusionment with results from other approaches to GTM activity. “We tried hiring sales development representatives and agencies but nothing stuck,” he says. The blended approach is proving much more effective in terms of clinching meetings with the enterprises that Join Digital targets, he adds.

Still, this is an increasingly crowded marketplace, with competitors to OneShot ranging from other scale-up businesses such as Luna.ai and Cynthia AI, as well as larger companies such as Hubspot and Braze. The key for all these rivals will be to identify where technology can deliver the best results – and where traditional human expertise and experience remains most valuable.