Machines of Connection

As time goes by, I find myself using AI more and more often to… connect with other people?

AI is certainly going to cost jobs and cause some degree of problems around the world, but you have a choice as to whether you use it to connect more with others or put more distance between people. I’ve shared stories of people using AI to create barriers between them and their customers (which is still baffling to me), but here are some ways I’m using it to build connection.

Pulse Messages

We have an internal app at GreenMellen called ClientPulse that we use to keep up with our clients and many of their needs. It works great! A few times a year I want to reach out to all of our clients to share ideas and see how they’re doing, but it becomes a messy spreadsheet to keep track of to make it happen. I don’t want to just send out some automation, but I want to really take a few minutes to send each one a personal message and make sure all is good, but that becomes hard to keep track of over the days as I work to reach a few hundred people one at a time.

I recently added some features to this tool to help me do that a little more efficiently. When I have a message I want to get out to many of our clients, such as the recent tweaking I’ve done to many of their cookie consent banners, this tool shows me who the clients are that this applies to, what their plan is with us, and queues me up. I can then do the work of writing the actual communication without having to do as much of the meta work to figure it all out.

Atlanta Marketing Events

A better example is a tool that my friend Chris has written to help connect the Atlanta marketing community. We put together an app (well, he did most of the work…) to help us plan events, decide who to invite, keep track of RSVPs, and deal with all of that stuff. Again, this used to be spreadsheets and emails and chaos, and now we have it all in one place.

The purpose? To facilitate excellent in-person events. We’re using AI to handle the organization so we can spend our time talking to great folks and enjoying meals with them. If you hear from Chris or I in the coming months asking you to join us for lunch or Topgolf or something, this tool was likely helping to make that happen.

Dex to Rekindle to MickeyNotes

I’ve shared before how I’ve used Dex to remind me to keep up with people, and a few months ago I created a simple AI-built app called Rekindle to do similar. Now I’ve built kind of a super-app to handle my notes and books and ideas and I’ve migrated the concepts from Dex and Rekindle into it. It’s fairly complex, but ultimately I’m using AI to do things like tell me “Mickey, you haven’t talked to Adam in a while and you really should reach out“.

Using AI to create real connections rather than putting out fake communication is a beautiful thing.