Isn't the answer obvious? The 40 companies will have to use AI to filter the messages too.

If your business is selling tokens, it'd be extremely lucrative for you if the whole society relies on tokens to perform basic operations. That's where we're heading to.

I haven't encountered bots but I've had several clients now send excel spreadsheets with requirements with just endless laundry lists of duplicate and semi duplicate and conflicting requirements. I strongly suspect they were the result of AI. These client's paid for the meeting digging through the mess so no loss but man ... it was horrible.

The primary person responsible couldn't explain much at all but man they were proud they came up with some brutal spreadsheets.

It’s really sad. I suppose for companies doing business online it’s just a (ballooning) cost of doing business, but for personal interactions it’s a disaster. I used to respond pretty enthusiastically to CTOs/team leads/recruiters reaching out who actually talk about details of my open source work as opposed to just sending a canned recruitment email. Nowadays I can’t be sure they’re not just using a bot to gather personalized details. Well, at least the last CTO reaching out to me said they found my profile while trawling with Claude, after I responded; appreciate the honesty I guess.

This is what happens when you place a "contact us for a quote" form on your website. You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where. Do you have any experience with a company that receives RFQs to land business? You will spend a lot of time answering all of the questions and digging around to ensure you can actually do what is requested spending days/weeks on it. Only for the work to go somewhere else. In fact, a lot of places require multiple quotes for work, so when they have someone they know they want to work with, they still have to have other companies spin their wheels. They have no qualms about it knowing they are wasting the other companies' time. It's pretty much how things are done.

Have you ever been in sales?

If the requests are real there would never be 5 thousands, let alone 5 millions (or the vendor would count their lucky stars).

If they are spams that already happens today as well, at scale. AI bot would not change that.

The vendor will never blindly make a sample just based on a single request. There will be back and forth. Maybe require proof that the inquirer is serious.

Sending out RFP to 40 vendors isn't unusual.

What's the difference between this and how its been done till now?

When sourcing you'd typical prepare a same request and email the supliers similarly looking emails and they - if interest on business - would respond and start a back and forth.

If anything now there will be more business. Filtering and triaging was always an issue you'd have to deal with and if the cost of dealing with small order is too high you just stop taking those and filter out large orders

A reasonable pushback. It originally only reached out to 5, didnt hear back, so reached out to 5 more. I personally pushed it to reach out to an additional 30 after that.

One of the difficulties of sourcing this is a lot of the suppliers in vietnam are only contactable via whatsapp. Emails are monitored far less. It's one of the reasons I haven't been successful with this in the past despite trying - it's a very word-of-mouth network.

I think that happens already with email. I get a ton of same emails "want to join my podcast" or "see my product" based on some github projects I did or so, clearly all ai written. Important to have a good screener in your email.

There will be reservation fees to start the process that only charges when there is no-show or time wasters.

Restaurants in London started charging when there is no show for reservations.

You need bots on th other side too. Simple

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