Outlit, a Y Combinator-backed startup, is promoting a sweeping use of artificial intelligence in customer management in which businesses would give each client their own software agent and allow that system to gather extensive information over time.
The company says this kind of persistent tracking could flag customers who may be about to leave and reveal opportunities to sell them more.
Here's what to know
According to Futurism, founders Josh Earle and Leo Paz are developing business-to-business software that combines a company's own records — such as call logs, product activity, and sales data — with outside signals from places like LinkedIn activity and company websites.
By pulling those sources together, Outlit says it can give sales and account teams a continuously updated view of each client, meant to cut down on "churn," or lost customers.
In a pitch email, Earle described the concept, saying, "Every company will soon assign an AI agent to every customer to watch their every move." He also told Futurism that "the whole surveillance component came up because that's the way we feel companies can serve their customers."
Earle said the product hasn't been publicly released yet, though the company is already working mostly with business-to-business software companies.
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He said Outlit is not aiming this at individual shoppers, telling Futurism, "We probably wouldn't be going business-to-consumer. The data would suck anyway."
What Outlit is trying to build, in Earle's description, is a constantly refreshed one-page file on each customer, saying, "And it's all of everything we can find on them at all times."
More background
That reach could theoretically include sensitive personal details if people post them publicly, such as information about a marriage, illness, divorce, or a death in the family. Earle said he'd "never thought about that, and we don't actively track it. But theoretically, we can monitor anything posted on the internet," Futurism reported.
Earle also told Futurism that Outlit doesn't think it needs to alert the customers it monitors or give them a way to opt out. "There's nothing that we're doing that's illegal, so we're within our right to be able to monitor signals," he said, while arguing that similar data collection already happens today.
The broader costs of AI are under increasing scrutiny.
AI can help businesses and utilities optimize logistics, predict demand, and improve clean energy systems. However, always-on tools like the agents Earle described rely on energy-intensive computing infrastructure that can increase electricity use and water consumption.
That AI expansion also raises security, misuse, and societal concerns, particularly when systems are designed to absorb massive amounts of human context.
Rather than dismiss those worries, Earle argued that this kind of system is coming anyway, even if people see it as "creepy."
What's being done?
Outlit says it has limited how the system operates.
For example, Earle said the company is focused on business-to-business clients rather than consumer surveillance, and Outlit's website says customer data is "secure and anonymized" and "not used to train its models," Futurism reported.
The company also says it is trying to make its recommendations understandable to the employees using them.
According to Earle, a salesperson or customer success manager would see a dashboard showing "all the contents that we pulled in, our reasoning, and what to do," along with the sources and signals behind each recommendation.
He said Outlit tells clients "what to say, what to send, materials, and all that stuff," particularly for account managers and customer success teams who need to understand customers to avoid losing the deal.
The company sets the safeguards.
Outlit's response to privacy concerns centers not on consent or transparency for the people being tracked, but on maintaining a narrower business focus and making internal promises about how it handles data.
Earle summed up the company's vision starkly: "Irrespective of how people feel about it, I think this whole concept of continuously monitoring — and call it surveillance, whatever you want — it is going to happen."
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