Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/1531611
17 IDA Universal January - February 2025 Could AI find your next customer or partner? Whether it's a new vendor, distributor, or customer - finding high-quality leads takes effort to get right. ere are many free sources online – Google, Maps, Facebook – and of course many paid sourc- es too – e.g. Zoominfo or CB Insights. When we started building In- tropy, we realised there are talented individuals and teams that spend the majority of their time collecting and managing lead data, with little time le to work on business and product strategy. So we thought: Can AI help here? Can AI automate the tedious work and free up these teams' time to focus on strategy and execution? We realised there were two problems to solve: 1. How can AI source leads cheaply from multiple online sources, and keep lists of leads up to date? 2. How can AI filter and prioritize these leads, so each business we serve is only handed the most relevant leads with the highest chance of success? (1) is solvable using AI agents. An AI agent is similar to a smart assistant - you can set it up to understand its environment, make decisions, and com- plete tasks. With recent developments in AI, the complexity of the tasks an AI agent can solve are increasing. Previously an agent could only reliably retrieve information "Siri, tell me what the weather will be tomor- row", but now AI can work through several steps without guidance "Siri, read the texts from Mom and reply to them". "Siri, get me a list of landscaping companies in Houston that prob- ably own an excavator" probably won't work out that well, though. So we built a squad of AI agents (I don't think that's the official term…) that understand the technicalities of lead generation for IDA's members. (2) is more difficult. How do you teach an AI everything it needs to know about a business - how it buys, what it stocks, where it sells, and how it sells? How do you capture the nuances of a company's culture, and translate that into a competitive advantage? We realized we can reuse our core AI here – that is, for each customer we serve, we train a person- alized AI model based exactly on how their business works. An AI just for you – it doesn't share information with AIs from other business- es, and is designed only to understand how you operate and what actions could have the biggest impact on your business. So the AI works in two steps: 1. A squad of AI agents scour the internet for vendor, customer, and product intelligence, to gather the largest industry-specific list of leads out there 2. A business can either search for leads as-is, or connect the AI to its systems. A connected AI can learn about its ideal vendor/customer profiles, product lines, and strategic differ- entiators, to provide curated leads that improve in quality over timeSo now owners, outside sales reps, account man- agers, and product managers looking for that next partner or customer can simply ask the AI. Sounds interesting? We need your help! We want your feedback as we build out this tool. Complete the short sur- vey here to help us tailor our AI to your needs, and to keep up to date with the latest product launches. Completing the survey will also give you early access, includ- ing free credits!