Hey Reader,

In every cohort of The AI Consultancy Project, the thing that shocks our students has nothing to do with prompts or tools. It’s that emailing a stranger who might hire you still works in 2026, even with inboxes buried in AI spam, as long as you do it well.

Many folks arrive convinced AI has made direct outreach pointless – they imagine you need to spend a ton of money on Meta ads or have a huge LinkedIn presence to get traction. But my friend Zack Arnold has the numbers to prove otherwise: his students get a 70% response rate on cold emails, while the default sits under 1%.

Zack and I sat down to talk about why, and the answer is the same idea that runs through everything we do here. Watch our full conversation on YouTube here.​

The idea: human connection is the thing AI can’t fake

Zack edited Cobra Kai, Empire and Burn Notice before becoming a career coach, and his students kept asking him for help writing outreach emails. Ten years later, he’s the outreach email guy. His best proof is best-selling author Adam Grant, who he cold-emailed in 2020. Adam politely declined to come on Zack’s podcast four times over six years (while introducing Zack to other guests along the way). The fifth time, Adam said yes, and that yes turned into the Connection Conference, five free days of conversations with Adam and dozens of other experts on how humans connect, starting October 19.

(Side note: I’m not getting paid to promote Zack’s conference – we’ve been friends for years and his work vibes with what we do at IWAI.)

Six years, five requests, and one relationship. No AI tool shortens that, but there are ways to use AI to make yourself better at it. Unfortunately, the way most people use AI for outreach makes them much worse at it.

AI made everyone a decent writer, which made ‘decent’ worthless

Here’s the thing: AI writes a clean, polite, grammatically perfect cold email. I could send one in German tomorrow, and I don’t speak German.

The problem is that everyone else can too. Zack borrowed a point from Ethan Mollick (who’ll also be at the conference): AI is a leveler. It pulls everyone to the same mid-level output, and mid-level output is what fills an inbox. Zack asked nearly every conference guest how they feel about AI-written messages, and the answer was the same:

I see this in my own inbox. Newsletter replies that are AI summaries of the newsletter I sent. Silly rehashes of the top of my LinkedIn profile. “I see you went to Syracuse, go Oranges.” 😅

Zack’s reframe:

AI isn’t killing cold outreach. It’s killing mediocre cold outreach.

He tested this. A Princeton computer science professor posted a chart of his PhD applications (70-something AI-generated, three human), declared cold outreach dead, and said he’d stopped reading it. Zack emailed him cold anyway and got a kind reply in 14 hours.

Zack’s 3-question test: bad friction, good friction, or the craft?

Zack is not anti-AI. He couldn’t have built this conference with his team size without it. He sorts every task into three buckets:

1. Bad friction. Tedious work nobody gives you credit for, like Googling every podcast someone has been on. Robots welcome.
2. Good friction. Effort that earns the result. Reading the book. Listening to the episode.
3. The craft. The thing you chose to do. For Zack, that’s writing. No robots allowed.

His AI research agent handles the bad friction: name a person and your goal, and it tells you which episode to watch and which chapter to read in the time you have. Then Zack does the reading, and Zack writes the email. Every message to every speaker, and every follow-up to their chiefs of staff, he wrote by hand.

It reminds me of the pre-AI hustle bros who bragged that their virtual assistant picked out their wife’s birthday present. Dude, the effort is the gift. The time you spent is the signal, because time is scarce.

A speaker went from 0 replies to a client who wants to make room for her

One of Zack’s clients, an author and speaker, had a VA pitching events with her name, her book, and three bullet points of features. Zero replies.

They built an agent that researched ~150 organizations against her criteria and ranked the top 10. She spent 5 minutes on each About page, then wrote those messages herself. Replies came in, including from organizations that weren’t booking speakers at all.

Sales tools use AI to increase volume at the expense of quality. Zack uses AI to increase quality, and lets volume come later.

Half an hour per lead can pay $300 an hour

This is the part I want our consulting students to tape to their monitors. You don’t need 4 hours per prospect. Half an hour on a company’s website, looking at it the way a customer would, gets you something specific to say.

Run the math. Spend 100 hours on research and outreach for 200 prospects. If that lands three $10,000 projects, you made $300 an hour, before referrals from those clients start to compound. Compare that to 10,000 automated emails at under 1%, each one reading like the other 50 in the recipient’s inbox that morning.

Zack put it this way: “AI doesn’t improve anything, it just amplifies something.” If your outreach is bad, AI scales bad.

How to fix an email you already botched

What if you already sent the mediocre email and got silence?

Zack’s answer: “There is no expiration date on providing genuine value to another human being.”

Look up what they’re working on now, then send a message that’s 100% value and 0% request. Tell them what their latest work made you think or feel. No pitch. It’s the first piece of his VSA formula (value, story, ask), and he insisted on one caveat: it only works if you mean it.

The same line runs through this newsletter, our consulting program, and Zack’s work

Our support team answers questions from several thousand students, and AI makes them about 10x faster behind the scenes. But we never reply with AI. Every answer comes from a named person who works here, and students tell us it feels like a luxury.

Our consulting students win clients the same way. Businesses don’t hire an AI consultant because the consultant has the best tools. Everyone has good tools now. They hire the person who took the time to understand their business and who they trust to show up.

And that’s why I read your replies to this newsletter myself, without AI.

AI handles the busywork so you have more time for the part that can’t be automated: being a person someone wants to work with.

Come hang out October 19-23

The Connection Conference is virtual, free, and runs October 19 through 23. Zack built a searchable knowledge base of every conversation, so you can point your own AI at it afterward. I’ll be there.

​Watch my full conversation with Zack on YouTube.​

And if someone’s work helped you this year, send them a two-line email today. No ask, just value.

Until next time,

Rob Howard
Founder, Innovating with AI

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