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Eric Miao, Chief Strategy Officer at Attentive, started his career in mobile advertising. He was at TapCommerce when Twitter bought it in 2014, and before that the most valuable team in his building was ad operations. Their job was to download the placement report every hour, read the bids, adjust, and repeat. Do it badly and you burned real money. That job does not exist anymore.

He thinks CRM is next. Not as a prophecy, more as a rerun. Three things from our conversation are worth your time.

The Constraint that Protected the Marketer is the One Dissolving

Ad ops did not disappear because someone invented AI. It disappeared because the platforms accumulated enough signal that a machine could make the hourly call better than the analyst with the spreadsheet. CRM has never had that volume of data, which is exactly why the job has been hard and why good marketers have been worth hiring. They have been making decisions on thin input for years.

Miao is careful about this. He says Attentive is proud of the tooling it has built for marketers, and then he says the premise underneath it is shaky: that a person should walk in every morning, make every decision, and leave. What he thinks has changed is the ability to work through a sequence of decisions without a human in every seat. If he is right about that, the scarcity that made the role defensible is the same thing going away.

Brand Voice Inflation is a Diagnostic Nobody was Running

Attentive collected 50 to 100 customer brand guides after clients kept asking to upload them into the product. One was a 50-page PDF governing email subject lines. Subject lines run about 40 characters. Another client flagged copy as off brand when the copy had been pulled straight from its own website. That was the website brand voice, they explained. They wanted the text message brand voice. Behind that sat an email brand voice and a direct mail brand voice.

Miao's position is that channel best practices are real and worth following, and that a company with four brand voices has conventions and a filing system. His follow-on point is the sharper one. He expects a lot of companies to look at this honestly and find they have a product people like rather than a brand. He does not frame that as a failure. He thinks it makes them faster to adopt the automation, because there is less worth protecting.

The Trust Argument, and Where it Comes From

Miao describes a fitness protein bar that blew up on the back of promoters holding undisclosed equity in the company, and a real band that collected real press coverage generated by accounts that were not real people. His conclusion is that permission to talk to a customer directly is appreciating in value, and that the content in that channel shifts from coupon mechanics toward something closer to storytelling.

That is a fair read of where consumer trust is heading. It is also the exact conclusion you would expect from a company selling owned messaging, and he acknowledged as much unprompted. The harder evidence he brought was on the other side of the ledger. Attentive sees ChatGPT referral traffic to brand sites growing quickly from close to nothing. He cited a presentation showing shopping as the weakest category for results sourced from LLMs. His theory is that people like shopping and are not looking to hand it off.

What He Has not Solved

Journey maps grow into flowcharts nobody can read. They get handed to one person who understands them, and then they freeze. Miao is direct that this is the design problem Attentive is working on, and that most of what they build sits somewhere in it.

Underneath is the part that stayed with me. The marketer is the connection between what the business bought, when it lands, what needs discounting, what is going to sell, and what the customer eventually sees. In most companies that logic has never been written down anywhere. It gets made on the fly. Automating the marketer means documenting the marketer first, and right now the documentation is a person sitting at a desk.