“Have your people talk to my people” may be seven of the most powerful words in Hollywood. The phrase acknowledges that there’s info, preferences, timing, etc. that would be best explored by others while we go on to other things for the moment. When the phrase is meant earnestly, 1 it neatly allows for absentee productivity. When people or companies can be productive without working, it’s magic.
The allure of AI agents has mostly been focused on automating work that is neatly defined to reduce costs. AI call centers. AI invoice matching and accounts payable. AI customer service chatbots.
None of that is the magic of have your people talk to my people, which will feel incredible. That feeling happens for businesses offline for trade shows, but infrequently and mired in a wash of uninterestingness. Coca-Cola’s representatives chat up McDonald’s representatives at a trade show and before you know it, there’s a partnership to sell Coca-Cola exclusively at the restaurants. Sometimes, though, it’s the fifteenth insurance salesman pitching you on helping lower your premiums.
An AI agent—armed with a briefing pack from an individual company—could waltz into a massive computing chip where it encounters other AI agents who were also armed with briefing packs from their individual companies. A trade show could break out, right there on the silicon chip.
The trade show has opportunities in multiple dimensions. Businesses can be buyers, sellers, partners, recruiters, trend setters, and consensus shapers. Having multiple dimensions, sometimes at the same time, is where the unexpected insights and partnerships come from.
A fintech company looking for design partners for a new product offering they are starting on. A startup looking for channel partners and affiliates. A company trying to understand where focus is shifting in a subsector of the industry. A sharp business development operator trying to suss out who has the biggest burning problems to solve. A VC scanning for heat and matches to a thesis.
Everyone has different agendas. Everyone also has some of the same agendas: make more money, improve or replace partners, and uncover what isn’t obvious from looking at other companies’ websites.2
People at a trade show are sitting with semi-private information that—to the right person—they are willing to divulge to get info back or to see if a deal could make sense. “We’re thinking about doing a recruiting event for our office in Austin, would you guys want to co-host?” and “_are you seeing Microsoft pull back from going after this space” _are the types of information that are semi-private and often bandied about. Private information, like Coca-Cola’s recipe or a layoff plan, simply isn’t brought to the trade show floor.
Trade shows have the nice feature of not being too frequent. Usually, a sector coalesces around a major show each year. Back when I was running a supply chain business focused on telecom, we used to go to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It seemed like everyone in telecom was there. Although, practically, that wasn’t the case.
Public information is already very accessible. Private information will still be inscrutable. 3 The semi-private information that is known to some, but not many, is where the intrigue and the advantages lie. The information that is sometimes boring, sometimes useless, sometimes noteworthy, and occasionally business-changing. The information is often out of reach of partners that could help. More good business could be done. AI is the unlock here to bring ideas, people, and companies together. Most of the discussions around AI agents have been around automating work, reducing costs and increasing speed. We are overlooking the revenue- generating nuggets. Perhaps some early flameouts in AI sales callers that cold call prospects soured us on the idea that AI can credibly bring in marketing qualified leads and warm business development prospects. The potential has been pushed down, out of sight.
“Have your people talk to my people” could come to mean the conversations between AI agents when a match, a hit, a potential deal, or a partnership starts to take shape. With the closing line, the humans can come in and vet and approve the agents’ diligent work.
In our ocean ecosystems, upwelling is the bringing of cold water and organisms and life up to the ocean’s surface from the unseen depths. Upwelling provides a major basis for aquatic life as we know it and the oceans would be very different without it. We’re on the cusp of an upwelling that brings the buried insights, connections, and partnerships to the surface for businesses without needing to send humans into the depths.