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One of the ways we want to enhance Kenobi is to allow the host site to plug in more data sources (e.g. an FAQ, KB, etc). This helps solve the research problem, and it also increases the utility of the tool because more the very generic website can be be customized in more nuanced, specific, and esoteric ways, depending on the visitor.
This is a great point, we've heard this elsewhere so I will be adding a section to our site for this. Thanks!
- Default h1 text: "Handcrafted custom maps for your graphic design project"
- If a visitor comes from airbnb.com: "Royalty-free vector maps for Airbnb listings & guides" (a bit too on-the-nose for tracking IMO)
- If a visitor comes from nationalgeographic.com: "Premium vector maps for editorial cartography"
- If a visitor comes from maps.google.com: "Take your Maps offline - royalty free"
I get it and it's good product that I'd even use, but the communication of the product is a bit horrible (you need an online website to "get" what the product does).
To be fair, you could hard-code and cache it if you have decent metrics of where your audience comes from. But obviously the upsell here is that it does that automatically.
It had no highlight styling so if you wanted to highlight a portion of your input it would be impossible to tell what the current selection was.
Looks cool, not trying to hate, I just have a pet peeve around native elements having basic function/accessibility features removed during heavy styling.
Definitely a balance to be struck with going heavy on styles, whilst not breaking native element features and violating users' expectations!
Of course internally it might be much more complex than this but this is how I would do this if I had to build it.
Obviously a lot of companies have vastly different personas, and this is a harder problem to solve which we are working on.
One idea would be to track what recent technologies/products they’ve bought recently (or what products they’re using) using Bloomberry. ie. If they’ve started using Okta, it might mean they’re investing in security tools [1]
[1] bloomberry.com
Neat idea to track the technologies they've bought _recently_ though! I think capturing buying signals (and inferring intent that way) would be a neat addition to the pipeline!
We're definitely going to be looking into finding more relevant signals on a case-by-case basis, and this kind of idea fits really neatly into that paradigm!
Failed requests that are coming in (people are trying some wild inputs!!) we are keeping an eye on and adding to our edge cases pile to fix asap!
By users, I mean the people who browse marketing websites. Do they think having their company name / information in your copy is going to be helpful or creepy?
Oh, and did the IP owners give you permission to take Obi-Wan's name in vain?
I tried several different domains and the copy was so generic it gave no indication of being personalised.
Second, we want to show B2B visitors’ brands in context. I.e. showing you what it would look like if your company was using the service in question with social proof from your industry peers. We don’t have our image tech in the on-demand demo right now, but companies that we have helped pre-render copies of their site with dynamic images (especially e-commerce brands), found higher engagement on their outreach as a result.
Appreciate the words!
We don't know for sure. This is built on the intuition that websites are still a one-size-fits-all approach that makes no sense in an age where we have intelligence at our finger tips, able to process and reformulate information that speaks directly to people.
You could see this idea as being on the opposite side of the same spectrum as agentic browsing (which hasn't really taken off yet).
And thanks for the feedback! There are limitations in the quality of the personalizations in onboarding experience due to latency constraints. These get lifted the moment you create an account, and can start doing some more in-depth context gathering of your website and the types of visitors you're likely to get.
If every website is tracking my identity and surrounding me with an echo chamber outside of my control, that is not a good thing.
If the profile and prompt is something the user controls, it could be useful, but it’s still hard to trust it. It takes away the ability to have trustworthy links to information/products, if it’s different for every user, especially if the customization methods are hidden behind opaque LLMs and system prompts.
I do think this idea can make money, but it’s likely bad for the internet consumers and likely to be part of future enshittification.
It’s also more tangential than argument above, but what we know about regular users of larger platforms indicates that a one size fits all approach doesn’t really fit all. Also consider that we really do have the tools/data now more than ever to offer a unique experience to users, and how that very concept of a unique user experience is what led to the proliferation of the platforms we use in the first place. There is a reason we preferred Google to Yellow pages and Google ad revenue took off — or atleast it wasn’t just about the profit motive of easy to access, updatable information.
The core functionality I expect for such a service is for it to automatically detect who I am, I've seen other marketing services do this, there are ways to map IPs to companies and other techniques.
And the personalisation itself... Anyone can make a call to an AI + Search service and generate a new version of the HTML with some very slightly modified text, which was not all that appealing or accurate.
I suppose it's nice that you are making this easy, if you built your site with a visual website builder this wouldn't be completely trivial to replicate. But still, not a very defensible business for now. I suppose that with good marketing and as serious roadmap to beef this up it could be a viable idea.
The number one request we have is to integrate deanonymisation, so you’re right on the money there. That’s coming in the next couple of weeks or so…
Wrt the changes being text-based for now, we do actually have image and complex element and layout generation working, but have kept it as an experiment for pre-rendered pages until we are confident we can get it right in most cases. (Some early beta users used Kenobi to send out in some cases thousands of customised landing pages with imagery)
We‘re also starting our on demand product with text only precisely because we want to hear what people think we should be working on next as we are a super small team of three!
I suppose I was frustrated due to a mismatch of expectations and the fact that I do things like this every day with AI, it feels rather trivial to me.
But I can see how it may appeal to a wider market. I remember coming across a couple websites that were doing this automatically pre-AI, simply detecting who I was and displaying it in some basic ways. And yeah it was a bit weird, but it sure stuck in my mind for a long time, and it was a data-broker type company anyways, it triggered the thought "well if it can do this with me, it must have good data about everyone".
> many people with a business profile that would certainly click a "just show me what I care about" button
You've encapsulated better than I did the kind of visitor segment we're building for right now.
> I do things like this every day with AI, it feels rather trivial to me.
I also agree with this sentiment. It's how I started ("surely it can't be hard to jiggle a page around now with LLMs") and it mostly worked! But the edge cases and heuristics are also proving to be a big chunk of the effort "iceberg" :D
I think this is cool and probably the future of B2B websites. My holdup would be, if the buyer enters their company and the copy just changes into what we think they want, are they going to lose trust that the copy is a true representation of our focus? Maybe it's a framing problem, lots of websites have "solutions" sections for different industries. Potentially could be cool to have a "how we can specifically help {your company}" with an exact use case outline.
Great point. That's pertinent to how we've been configuring the research → computing "intent" pipelines. Our focus right now is mainly just to streamline content and show brands "in context" as much as possible without having too much of an "opinion".
Your idea about showing how specifically the company could be helped + a use-case is lovely way of putting some of the more complex layout generation ideas we've been working on!
However, we did already start experimenting with the agentic browsers like Atlas and Strawberry — I built a PoC for the former. But this is still very much experimental!
Even better, the LLM can make up rules for matching traffic to targeted profiles (corp IPs shows enterprise content, gov IPs shows gov offering, EU IPs shows European hosting options, etc). This way you don't use an LLM while rendering the page, reducing cost and speeding up page load times.
Please reach out to us if you would like to at product@kenobi.ai
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