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📩This kind of automation can make you look incompetent

📩This kind of automation can make you look incompetent

August 11, 2025

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📩This kind of automation can make you look incompetent

Hey, Inbox Hackers. Happy Monday and all that. The Main Thing today is a warning. Automated emails can bite you in the butt.

Nibble on the appetizer below, then we’ll get into the Main Thing.

Appetizer: Watch: Branding expert says this type of photo is a scroll stopper on LinkedIn.

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The Main Thing

How Automation Can Bite You in the Butt

I had a whole different topic outlined for today’s Inbox Hacking, but had to change it after reading an email I got over the weekend.

The email made the sender look foolish. I refuse to say who it was from. Ok, it was from Scott Galloway’s Section newsletter😎.

I’m a fan of Galloway’s financial insights. Dude’s smart and has founded a lot of companies. This company, Section, does training (not cheap, either). Focused on AI training, currently.

Section is supposed to help people cut through the noise of AI hype and find out how to use it to advance their career and get stuff done. But after their coverage of ChatGPT-5 in Saturday’s email, I have doubts about their competence.

I’ll post a few screenshots from their email below.

Seems to me, Section just regurgitated OpenAI’s press releases without testing GPT-5 because according to most of the internet, GPT-5 was an embarrassing flop.

Gizmodo, Reddit, TechCrunch, Tom’s Guide. All the tech news outlets covered the “outrage” over the newest version of ChatGPT.

They had nearly 24 hours to test GPT-5 and give their readers a legit review. All the newsletter subscribers got was a rehashing of Sam Altman’s claims about how great the newest GPT model was.

Screenshots of what the web thought of GPT-5 on Friday are below.

So, I’m guessing automation is to blame. I suspect an automated email was scheduled from Section before GPT-5 fell on its face. And the automated email never got changed.

This is the perfect example of how automation can go wrong. In pre-scheduled emails or social media posts either one.

It’s so easy to set them and forget them.

Especially when your company is B2B and isn’t thinking about checking or changing an email on a Saturday morning. So, the warning here is to have a checklist to ensure automated emails are not going to bite you in the butt and make you look incompetent.

Now, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that email was exactly what Section meant to send out. If so, that’s even worse. Because either they don’t want to make AI look bad even when it flops. Or they are just a parrot for Sam Altman.

I tend to believe automation is to blame. Anyway, on to Monday Marketing News.