Hey there,

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.”