Was listening to a radio programme recently with 3 entrepreneurs talking about being entrepreneurs.
In relation to sales, there were two gems. For direct to consumer type companies - influencers are where it's at right now especially during bootstrap phase - and they were talking about trying to keep marketing budget under 20% of sales.
Another, who is mostly in the VC business, finds the best way to gain traction for his startups is to create controversy - ie anything to be talked about.
In both cases you are trying to be talked about - either by directly paying for people to do that, or by providing entertainment value so people talk about you.
You could argue that both of those activities are already been automated - and the nice thing about sales is there is that fairly direct feedback loop you can actively learn from.
Yeah I really would like to know how many bots are on reddit (and on particular subreddits/threads) and also how many are here!
The interesting thing though is that the bots are just cheaper versions of real human influencers. So nothing has changed aside from scale (and speed) - the underlying mechanisms of paying for word of mouth is the same as it's been for a long time.