I owe my competitor an apology (kinda)

Confession:

I wrote an email a few weeks ago back bashing "agentic AI" as overhyped marketing fluff.

A competitor had been hammering the term in her ads relentlessly... so I bought her product to see what all the fuss was about.

Tested it out.

Found the bots pretty underwhelming compared to what I'd already built inside ESS AI…

And so, after being flooded with her over-the-top ads all week…

I decided to write a snarky email about it lol

Anyhow, all the while…

I've been deep in the build-out of a new funnel for a brand new offer that I’ve been working on for the past month or so…

And naturally, I wanted the positioning and copy to be as sharp as possible…

To make sure it performs well on cold traffic.

So I pulled up the Perplexity Space I’ve set up exclusively for ESS AI.

(aka their version of a Project)

Actually quick aside:

I've been using Perplexity's browser assistant extensively throughout the ESS AI build…

And it has been a total game-changer.

I can’t even remember what life was like before you could get AI to take over your browser and do stuff for you.

How did I even survive?! Haha

Anyway, this Space has my entire codebase plus all the supporting documentation Claude Code has generated inside it…

Which makes it super easy to get fast, accurate answers on pretty much anything related to ESS AI...

Because unlike a regular search…

Perplexity can actually review the real code, not just my description of it.

Pretty cool, right?

Highly recommend it for any big project you’re working on.

Now, back to the matter at hand:

As I was marinating on how to make the copy for this new funnel positively S-L-A-P…

I decided to pose this question in my Perplexity Space:

***

"Does ESS AI qualify as agentic AI?"

***

Fully expected it to say no…

As I thought ‘agentic’ essentially meant ‘autonomous’.

Turned out, I was dead wrong.

Instead, Perplexity came back with a detailed breakdown of exactly why ESS AI qualifies as ‘agentic AI...

- Tool calling
- Multi-step actions
- Layered context protocols
- Sophisticated operational architecture
- Etc etc

I immediately felt like an idiot lol

So here I am, coming clean.

Because there’s a crucial positioning lesson buried within…

Which is:

You can have the BEST product in the room and still LOSE the positioning battle…

… by avoiding the language your market is already using.

Nobody cares what I think about ‘agentic AI’.

If that’s how people are talking about my product, then I need to meet them where they are.

End of story.

As I love to remind clients and customers…

You are not your audience.

Coming back to the new offer…

It’s juuuuust about done.

And I am really friggin’ excited about it…

Because I’ve taken many of the lessons I learned from running ads to my Tiny Visual Book funnel over the past 18 months…

Adapted them to the new post-AI info market landscape…

And packaged it all into a new format that I really think is gonna resonate.

Let’s gooooooo

I’ll be officially opening the doors to it next week.

So in the meantime…

Stay tuned 🤘

Jim Hamilton