Operators Are Standing By… But They Can’t Count!
You just upgraded your OpenAI account for the month to give Operator a shot and tasked it with cleaning up your CRM. Step one, an easy task to warm up: deduplicate and check if existing customers are already in the system. Surprisingly, you still find a few duplicates here and there, and some clients are still missing from the system.
Not ready to give up yet, you move on to the next task: segmenting your customer list to identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and then using that ICP to find new prospects. And that’s when things go off the rails. Your AI assistant starts losing track, repeating segments, and somehow managing to misplace entire categories. The culprit? Despite all its intelligence, it can’t count.
Generative AI models are great at recognizing patterns and producing text, but they struggle with long-range consistency, meaning they lose precision when working with structured data. Ask them to generate a taxonomy of exactly 64 industry categories, and they might give you 62 or 66. Tell them to copy a table row by row, and they'll get confused after 50 or so entries. AI doesn’t follow explicit logic like a traditional database query, it predicts the next word or number based on probabilities. The result? Your AI-powered operator isn't much better than an over-caffeinated intern with a short attention span.
This limitation becomes a real problem when you need precise segmentation and accurate ICP modeling. If your AI assistant struggles to count and categorize correctly, how can it reliably identify patterns in your best customers and apply them to new prospects? It might generalize too broadly or miss critical segments, leading to poorly targeted prospect lists and wasted outreach efforts. In the end, your well-intentioned automation can create more noise instead of improving precision.
So, while AI-powered tools can be fantastic assistants, they aren't a substitute for real data-driven logic when it comes to structured prospecting and segmentation. If your business relies on getting ICPs exactly right, don’t leave the job to a generative AI model alone. Instead, use purpose-built systems that understand structure, maintain numerical accuracy, and ensure that your prospecting is as sharp as your sales team needs it to be. Otherwise, your AI operator might still be "standing by", just very, very confused.
👉 At discolike.com, our purpose-built models are not generative, and they can count.
Not ready to give up yet, you move on to the next task: segmenting your customer list to identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and then using that ICP to find new prospects. And that’s when things go off the rails. Your AI assistant starts losing track, repeating segments, and somehow managing to misplace entire categories. The culprit? Despite all its intelligence, it can’t count.
Generative AI models are great at recognizing patterns and producing text, but they struggle with long-range consistency, meaning they lose precision when working with structured data. Ask them to generate a taxonomy of exactly 64 industry categories, and they might give you 62 or 66. Tell them to copy a table row by row, and they'll get confused after 50 or so entries. AI doesn’t follow explicit logic like a traditional database query, it predicts the next word or number based on probabilities. The result? Your AI-powered operator isn't much better than an over-caffeinated intern with a short attention span.
This limitation becomes a real problem when you need precise segmentation and accurate ICP modeling. If your AI assistant struggles to count and categorize correctly, how can it reliably identify patterns in your best customers and apply them to new prospects? It might generalize too broadly or miss critical segments, leading to poorly targeted prospect lists and wasted outreach efforts. In the end, your well-intentioned automation can create more noise instead of improving precision.
So, while AI-powered tools can be fantastic assistants, they aren't a substitute for real data-driven logic when it comes to structured prospecting and segmentation. If your business relies on getting ICPs exactly right, don’t leave the job to a generative AI model alone. Instead, use purpose-built systems that understand structure, maintain numerical accuracy, and ensure that your prospecting is as sharp as your sales team needs it to be. Otherwise, your AI operator might still be "standing by", just very, very confused.
👉 At discolike.com, our purpose-built models are not generative, and they can count.
