016 AI for Operators

Hi there, 

Welcome back to AI for Operators. Here’s what we’ve got for you this week:

• The Operator: Eren Celebi, AI Lead at WPP (listen to the episode here)

• The Review: Happenstance.ai: social network search

• The Links: 7 links, including custom tutors from Google, insights from CPG companies, and virtual agent economies.

This is not a sponsored post.

What it Does

It’s an AI-powered people search for your professional and personal networks: tell it what you’re looking for (in natural language), and it will return a list of people that most closely match your query.

Why Ops Leaders Should Care

Recruiting, sales, partnerships, external expertise: putting your extended network to good use is incredibly important as an ops leader in numerous ways. An easier way to see who’s actually in your network will help you move faster and make better decisions.

Key Features of Gamma 3.0 (Pros & Cons)

Pros

• Natural language search means that queries like “Head of Sales” also returns the VP Sales and CROs in your network.

• Unify your disparate networks/contact books from LinkedIn, email, Twitter, etc. into a single place.

• Inherently social: results show who your mutual connections are; you can also add 'friends’ to your network to be able to search through their networks, too (opt-in only!).

• Groups: want to embark on a recruiting power hour, or need to see who on your sales team might be connected to a key prospect? You can create a collective network database to search through, without fully giving each member’s privacy.

• Integrations: tag Happenstance in Slack or forward a request to [email protected] to work with Happenstance where you spend the rest of your time.

Cons

• Limited to people in your known contacts: you won’t have access to everyone else in the world, which means your results will be limited.

• Privacy concerns with “friending”: lack of granular access control means that if you “friend” someone, they can see your full network, which you may not want.

• Friction to onboard your full network: while it automatically parses your email, you’ll to download its Chrome extension or manually download your contacts from X and LinkedIn to add them to your network on Happenstance.

• Small, early-stage team: with ~$550k raised and a team of only a few people, you may be concerned about providing your data to - or starting to rely too heavily - on a less-than-established company.

Other Options

Bottom Line

Is it “by far the best social network search” as YC’s Garry Tan claims? Maybe. While it’s an early-stage product, it’s worth trying if you lean heavily on your network, whether for sales, recruiting, fundraising, partnerships, or outside expertise.

Join Chief of Staff Network and Lindy

At a hand’s-on workshop on building agents on October 15 at 2pm ET