Alec
947 posts
@ahaase36
GM @Hightouchdata | Building agentic systems that run modern marketing | ex @redventures
every marketer I talk to is banging their heads against a wall right now "how do I get AI ads to not be... so bad?" we just launched Ad Studio @HightouchData ✅ we know your brand ✅ we know your existing creative ✅ we know what works in your ads ps: you can edit without re-prompting
.@HightouchData launched an AI ad creation tool 20 months ago and has added $70M in ARR since, bringing them to $100M total. Brands like Domino's, Spotify, PetSmart, and Chime use it to build personalized campaigns without design teams or agencies. techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/hig…
One corollary to the fact that AI agents take real work to setup in company at scale, is that the role of the forward deployed engineer -or whatever it gets called in the future- isn’t going away any time soon. When a vendor sells any kind of agents into an organization, you’re no longer just selling a software tool that gets implemented and you’re done. You’re fundamentally selling some form of the actual workflow being done by your technology. This is far closer to a customer buying from a professional services firm than implementing traditional technology. This will almost always require a deep understanding of the domain that the customer operates in, the ability to help a customer wire up their systems to support the agents, make sure all the context is setup in the right way, and help provide change management to actually get the company to adapt its business processes. The ability to do this across customers, figure out best practices in a specific industry and customer segment, take new features back to go build in the product, and so on is going to be key. There’s no shortcut to getting this work done by the enterprise, and the vendors are going to have to do a lot of this or risk low adoption. Finally, this is a big opportunity for existing and next gen professional services companies. There are all new practice areas emerging in every system integrator and consulting firm just to do this kind of work, and this is going to continue to be in demand for quite some time. Yet another example of jobs that aren’t actually going away.
Someone needs to build a company around Customer Context Graph. Collect all the threads – emails, meeting transcripts, slack messages, contracts, deliverables, detail, info, and config – from your customers into context that can be explored and queried by agents. This info is scattered between CRMs, ticketing systems, note takers, product, landing pages – it's inherently cross platform information. You need a new solution. Kind of how Segment did it trad SaaS apps. With this context, you can fire up Claude Cowork or similar for ad-hoc work or build extremely powerful agent automation flows. Expose the context as skills, MCP, and file system. Even better if you build it as open-source with a hosted option so people can take it on-prem as needed. Create a connector ecosystem around it. This will power every single next-gen AI-native full-stack business. Sort of like the context graph (@ashugarg @JayaGup10 ) that has been discussed recently but I'm thinking something very concrete: "Get me all the context about this particular customer." A customer-level, cross-system context substrate that agents can explore and act on
When people say things like “it’s unfair that big authoritative sites like Healthline get to rank for everything,” remember: They were once a small blog too. They did SEO right. They played the long game. They stayed the course (and still are). They put E-E-A-T at the forefront of their SEO approach from the start. I’m not saying they are perfect, and every site has flaws, but they’re a good example of what a risk-averse, E-E-A-T-driven SEO strategy looks like.
