Nobody Cares About Your Chatbot

Code is cheap now. Building something that would have taken a year and $500K in 2019 takes a weekend and $200 in API credits. That’s genuinely exciting — and it’s producing a lot of chatbots nobody asked for.

The problem isn’t the technology. The problem is that cheap code has never solved distribution.

We keep confusing the cost of building with the cost of reaching people. They’re not related. A better hammer doesn’t make it easier to sell hammers. Every demo that starts with “we built this in a weekend” is describing a supply-side achievement in a demand-side game.

Agentic marketing will be the next wave of attempted shortcuts. Autonomous agents crawling LinkedIn, generating outreach, personalizing at scale, testing a thousand micro-campaigns simultaneously. It’ll work — briefly. Then users will develop agent blindness, the same way they developed banner blindness in 2001 and email blindness in 2015. Platforms will start blocking it. The window closes.

Here’s what doesn’t change: humans want other humans to walk them through the awareness-consideration-conversion funnel. Not because we’re irrational, but because trust is a social technology, and social technology evolves at the pace of culture, not at the pace of inference speeds.

Agentic commerce might compress and integrate the four funnel steps in ways we haven’t seen since Google collapsed discovery and search into a single surface. But even then, every step needs to be manually optimized by a human. Agents can execute. They don’t yet know what to optimize for.

Distribution is hard. Code is cheap. No amount of AI capability resolves the tension between these two facts. The bottleneck has never been the product. It’s always been convincing a stranger to care.

Sales is everything.

ps: if you made it this far then maybe I can throw in a promo for my three experimental chatbots I built over this weekend 🙂

• zakon.podstreha.si – rag over all of Slovenian legislation and legal practice
• napomoc.podstreha.si – rag over specialised recommendations of expert paediatricians
• pojmovnik.si – rag over encyclopaedia of modern and postmodern art in Slovenia