Outlit’s plan is to give each customer an AI agent that continually collects information and directs sales teams’ next steps. Cofounder Josh Earle put the thesis this way in a pitch email: “every company will soon assign an AI agent to every customer to watch their every move.”
Earle and Leo Paz founded the Silicon Valley startup, which has backing from Y Combinator and presents “AI customer surveillance” as the future of business-to-business sales. Futurism calls the venture vibe-coded. When the publication reported on it, Outlit was primarily working with B2B software companies and hadn’t launched publicly. No release date appears in the source.
The company describes limits on its work that are narrower than its ambitions. That mismatch becomes apparent when it’s asked about personal information and whether the people it monitors should be notified.
“The whole surveillance component came up because that’s the way we feel companies can serve their customers,” Earle told Futurism. “It’s really the only way we see this is going to play out.”
Earle says the agents draw from both company records, such as sales data and call logs, and outside sources, including social posts and customers’ employers’ websites. Outlit aims to collect as much information about clients in real time as it can, then assemble detailed profiles. These often include “actionables,” meaning recommendations for outreach and guidance on sales. The company says the information could reveal chances to upsell or help avoid churn, the business term for losing customers.
“Every company is looking to automate so much customer work with agents, but there’s a whole issue of data freshness, real-time understanding of customers,” Earle said. “What we found was that if we were able to basically monitor a customer across every internal and external signal, we could actually create a real-time understanding, and this would include monitoring all the activity under product, under [customer relationship management], under LinkedIn, under website” and, in his words, “everything.”
In Earle’s account, the interface amounts to a continually refreshed dossier with instructions for sales teams. “It’s one page, and it’s always updating,” he said, “and it’s all of everything we can find on them at all times.”
Futurism notes that businesses already hold large volumes of client information and look online for details about customers and their employees. Outlit’s argument is that a single worker can’t effectively collect all the useful material available, much less understand it while it’s still relevant. What concerns the publication is the extraordinary scale and ongoing collection and consolidation that automation makes possible. Unlike people, agents have no need for sleep.
Earle outlined how a salesperson or customer success manager would wake up, then check the engine dashboard. “It’ll show these cases that we built, all the contents that we pulled in, our reasoning, and what to do,” he explained. “Then for each customer, you can see all the sources. You can see all of the signals that have come in, all of the relevant ones, irrelevant ones. So it’s a real-time hub of insights, and then it’s pushing out these actionables. We have all this data. What should you do with it? What’s top of mind right now?”
According to Earle, that guidance includes “what to say, what to send, materials, and all that stuff.” He identifies account managers and customer success teams as a particular fit, because they “need to understand their customer” and “can’t afford to lose the deal.”
“That’s the big stress point where people really love us,” Earle said. He expressed their worries as: “I can’t afford to lose this. I can’t afford not to be on top of this, and I’m just scrambling right now.” In his view, that pressure can lead someone to want to monitor a customer and learn everything about them.
The company says its scope is business customers, not individual consumers, and that it has no desire to move into consumer monitoring. “We probably wouldn’t be going business-to-consumer,” Earle told Futurism. “The data would suck anyway.”
But a business focus doesn’t mean the collection would cover only business records. Although Earle said agents aren’t following random shoppers across the web, he described the aim as to “be monitoring every external data piece from a company, and the internal as well…” Companies, he said, need information about their customers from every call, interaction and LinkedIn.
As Futurism notes, public accounts contain more than professional updates. A LinkedIn post or another public social account might announce a marriage, a baby or another exciting change in someone’s life. It could instead disclose a divorce, an illness diagnosis or a death in the family. Such information can sit beside the professional signals Outlit seeks.
When asked if the collection could pick up those details, 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.” That response distinguishes the company’s stated active tracking from the possible reach of its monitoring. It doesn’t rule out personal information entering the system.
Futurism also asked if Outlit believed it should notify the people it monitors or give them a way to opt out. Earle’s answer was no.
“There’s nothing that we’re doing that’s illegal, so we’re within our right to be able to monitor signals,” he said. This is his assessment of the practice, rather than a legal conclusion reached independently. He added: “I wish what we were doing was extremely novel. It’s a new way of doing it, but this is already being done today.” The company’s website says customer data is kept secure and anonymized, and won’t be used to train its models.
For Earle, constant monitoring is something that will happen, not an option businesses might turn down. “This is how companies need to operate to be able to serve their customers,” he told Futurism. He predicted that agents gathering data would “maintain and understand human relationships better than humans will.”
Earle said some of the people he talks to find the idea weird or creepy. Nevertheless, he argued that people’s feelings won’t prevent the monitoring from happening. “I think people are underestimating how well agents can absorb context, and how that translates into understanding, and maintaining human relationships better than humans can,” he said.
Where business monitoring ends remains unanswered when customers’ public updates disclose marriages, illnesses or losses in the family. Outlit doesn’t actively track those details, Earle says. Yet he describes a theoretical ability to monitor anything online, without notifying the people under observation or letting them opt out.
