Every "AI personalization" demo looks the same. Someone types a name and a company into a box, an LLM spits out three paragraphs of warm, specific-sounding prose, and the room nods. Then the email goes out and the prospect replies "who is this and how do you know I switched CRMs?" because the model didn't know that, it guessed, and it guessed right by accident.
We wrote about this problem at a high level in "How AI Is Quietly Rewiring Outbound", where the short version was: personalization isn't a prompting problem, it's a retrieval problem. This post is the long version, specifically the retrieval half of that pipeline.
*The Core Split: Generation vs. Grounding
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There are two very different jobs hiding inside "write me a personalized email":
