Our team just got back from San Francisco. The place to be if you want the latest about AI and tech, there is no other way to say it, and no regrets for saying it. A charming city, vibrant, and motivating to be around that many senior executives at Dreamforce.

It was our first time. And I will admit something. If I had no idea what to do with my life, after seeing this event I would have wanted to organise tech events. A sort of Cannes Lions, but for tech, in their home, San Francisco.

Let us get to work now. First we squeeze the slop out of your email. Then some cute pics from SF, and the highlights.

Last month I had three lines to send. I wanted them to land, so I asked GPT for a beautiful email. I got ten pages. Polished, warm, and empty. Not one of them said the thing I needed to say.

Here is the idea I want to leave with you this week:

A sentence that sounds like it says something and does not. That is what your reader smells, in about two seconds, and it is never the grammar. The grammar is perfect. That is part of the problem.

So use AI. Use plenty of it. Save your voice as a skill, hand the checking to an agent, plug the tools into your real data so they stop guessing. But make it sound like you.

Delve no more.

Cut these whenever you feel like “a small correction” is needed.

One rule under all ten: each phrase is standing where a fact should be. Cut it, and the gap left behind is where the specific thing goes. That is why your email gets shorter and better at the same time.

How many times this month did you paste an email into a chat window and ask for a better version?

And when you did, what did you actually give it to work with?

Recommended: answer honestly. The second question is where the fix lives.

Take the last email you sent to a customer. Delete every sentence that would still make sense sent to a different customer, about a different thing. Read what is left.

Then reply to this email and tell me what survived. I read every reply, and the best ones go in next week’s issue, anonymous if you prefer.

Moscone Center. The logo strip under the banner is most of the industry, standing in one line.

The Tower, from directly underneath · the Salesforce and Anthropic stand · me, under the handshake.

As promised. And the highlights, mostly from Marc Benioff’s keynote.

A truck selling BIG AI ENERGY, parked outside a photography studio. This is what the city sells you before anybody says a word.

“The models know everything except your business.” The frontier models, he argued, know just about everything about the world. They do not know your customers, your pipeline, your inventory, your permissions. Every billboard on the ride in from the airport sells compute. The keynote sold context. If both are right, the scarce thing in your company is not AI. It is the state of your own data.

Agents with names. Salesforce runs its own agents in production and names them like employees. Casey on customer service. Hunter on sales. An agent with a name is an agent somebody is accountable for. That is a governance move dressed as branding, and worth copying.

Trust positioned as the product. “Our product is the trust that all of you put in us to hold your data, your workflows, your permissions.” A 27-year-old software company positioning on custody rather than capability. If you sell into long procurement cycles, that is the move to watch.

One more thing before you go. Send me the worst AI-slop line you received this week. Just hit reply and paste it, no commentary needed. The three best ones open next week’s issue, sender and company blurred.

Brave New Media is a boutique B2B media and marketing agency. Small team, we work globally.

If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here. One email, Tuesday mornings.

Talk next Tuesday,

Anne, Founder, Brave New Media The Brave New Business Journal · Issue 21