What evidence should an AI show before recommending who to contact?
One design problem we keep running into while building Netlio: a useful people recommendation needs to explain itself.
Suppose a founder is deciding between seat-based and usage-based pricing. Returning a list of product leaders is easy.
A more useful result would identify one person and show:
- they led the same pricing transition recently
- they were close enough to the decision to know what actually broke
- there is a real relationship path
- the timing makes the conversation relevant now
Then the product should suggest a narrow question, not a generic networking message:
“What created more customer pushback: the pricing metric or the migration?”
The part I’m still testing is how much evidence to expose. Too little feels like a black box. Too much makes the result harder to scan.
If you were using an AI agent for this, what would you need to see before trusting the recommendation?
Replies