MY TAKE: The signal vs. the noise: email messaging in the era of my AI talking to your AI – Source: www.lastwatchdog.com

By Byron V. Acohido

Not long ago, I found myself staring at a reply that could’ve come from a bot.

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It was a polite follow-up from a PR rep reiterating a pitch I had already acknowledged — and responded to with a thoughtful, clearly outlined counter-offer. My reply wasn’t off-the-shelf.

It was a handcrafted editorial opportunity, structured to surface the core of what her client was trying to say, and to give it visibility in a high-trust format.

AI to AI dialogues

We’ve reached a point in professional communication where much of the dialogue — especially in the cybersecurity ecosystem — is now AI-assisted messaging interacting with other AI-assisted messaging. It’s no longer a question of whether ChatGPT or similar tools are in the loop. They are. The only real question is: what role are they playing?

That distinction matters — especially when the goal is to break through a saturated media environment and actually get a message heard.

At Last Watchdog, I’ve spent years developing a repeatable editorial model that delivers. I call it the Spotlight Bundle — a modular set of content formats built to cut through the noise, elevate real expertise, and create narrative equity that lasts well beyond a single news cycle.

But increasingly, I’ve noticed that even when I respond to a PR inquiry with a relevant, tailored, journalist-led offer — I get bypassed. Or ignored. Or sent a lightly modified version of the same pitch again, as if our exchange never happened.

It’s not rudeness. It’s automation.

Automation Run Amok

What I’ve been observing in cybersecurity PR — and increasingly across broader B2B tech — is more than just a communication hiccup. It’s a preview of what’s coming.

The flurry of AI-assisted emails, template-driven CRM outreach, and press releases written by bots and read by bots isn’t just annoying — it’s a signal. A canary in the coal mine.

We’re witnessing how human relationships — the connective tissue of trust-based industries — begin to erode when communication becomes fully automated. What’s happening to media relations is also happening to customer support, to recruiting, to sales pipelines — to any function once reliant on conversation and discernment.

This is the same pattern Microsoft seems to be betting on. When it laid off 15,000 employees in the name of “AI transformation,” it wasn’t just trimming fat. It was clearing space to replace flesh-and-blood knowledge workers with AI agents that can operate 24/7 across every interface — email, chat, workflow, voice.

The scary part? They won’t be alone. Other enterprises will follow. Not just because it’s possible — but because it’s cheaper, faster, more scalable. The long game is AI managing AI, with humans somewhere off to the side. What I’m seeing in my inbox is only a first taste.

Navigating the noise cycle

We’ve seen this movie before. Twenty-five years ago, the rise of e-commerce and digital publishing produced a Wild West moment. Everything was up for grabs — inventory, attention, search results, advertising models, monetization schemes. And with enough early traction, even harebrained ideas could ride a wave of hype and funding to a public offering.

Now it’s happening again — but the stakes are bigger. This time, it’s not shopping carts or click-throughs. It’s the very guts of knowledge work — email, meetings, pitches, memos, reports, creative briefs, strategic decks — the connective tissue of how modern organizations operate. All of it is now fair game for automation.

And AI is already being deployed to take over that work — not just enhance it, but replace it.

Which brings us back to email. And meetings. And bots that seem to be helping… until they start making decisions for you.

Not long ago, I experienced this firsthand. I recorded a simple podcast interview — just me and the guest, or so I thought. The next day, I received an unexpected email from a service I’d never heard of: ReadAI. It included a screenshot of the Zoom call, a summary of what was said, and a prompt to “claim my notes.” Turns out, my guest had a calendar integration that allowed ReadAI to silently join our meeting, record it, transcribe it, and analyze it — all without notifying me, the host.

This wasn’t some rogue actor. It was standard automation, designed to be helpful. But what struck me was how smoothly it had overridden consent. No alerts. No permission request. Just machine logic doing what machine logic does: optimizing flow by erasing friction — including the friction of basic human courtesy.

Reframing human rituals

When I look at this incident now, I don’t see a one-off glitch. I see a signal. A quiet but telling moment where machine-driven logic hijacks the most basic of human rituals — a conversation — and reframes it as data to be captured, processed, and redistributed, with or without the participants’ approval.

Multiply that by a few million meetings a day, and you begin to understand the scale of what’s happening. AI isn’t just surfacing insights or reducing toil. It’s reshaping the very norms of authorship, consent, and control — from inside the operating system.

That’s why this moment reminds me so much of the early 2000s. Back then, if you missed the memo that the internet was about to restructure your industry, you didn’t survive. Today, if you miss the memo that AI is reprogramming the culture of communication itself — not just the tools, but the expectations, the etiquette, the entire cadence of how work gets done — then you risk becoming obsolete without realizing it.

This isn’t about resisting change. It’s about staying human inside the change.

What’s needed now is not more automation for its own sake. It’s discernment. Guardrails. Protocols. And above all, clarity — about what we’re optimizing for, and what we’re willing to trade away to get there.

Because in this new noise cycle, it’s not just the loudest signals that win. It’s the ones that still mean something. The ones that carry intent. The ones that keep us connected — not just to information, but to one another.

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(Editor’s note: A machine assisted in creating this content. I used ChatGPT-4o to accelerate research, to scale correlations, to distill complex observations and to tighten structure, grammar, and syntax. The analysis and conclusions are entirely my own—drawn from lived experience and editorial judgment honed over decades of investigative reporting.)

July 28th, 2025 | My Take | Top Stories