Collective[i] and the question behind a network invite

An invitation landed in my inbox late last week to join a “professional network built from real relationships”. I didn’t recognise the company, so I had it properly investigated before responding.

The company behind it, Collective[i], is real and funded. It isn’t a scam in any conventional legal sense. What is worth examining, however, is the growth mechanic, particularly because it is becoming increasingly common.

Connect your email and calendar, and the platform can use that relationship graph to generate invitations sent under your name to your own contacts, without what most recipients would regard as informed consent. The “free network” therefore isn’t really free. Your relationship graph is the asset being harvested, and it becomes the fuel for generating the next wave of invitations.

In one sense, this is an old multi-level growth mechanic wearing new, AI-flavoured clothing. What has changed is the plausibility and scale. A platform that can process an email and calendar graph, identify relevant relationships and generate a personalised-sounding invitation on your behalf can make a manipulative growth loop look remarkably similar to a genuine warm introduction.

The technology doesn’t make the practice more legitimate. It simply makes the mechanism harder to spot, easier to automate and far cheaper to operate at scale.

That matters because the professionals most likely to be valuable to these platforms are also the ones most likely to assume that an invitation arriving through a trusted relationship is exactly what it appears to be: a genuine introduction from someone they know.

So before connecting an account to any platform promising a smarter professional network, it is worth asking a rather more basic question: what exactly is being harvested, and who will it be sent to next in my name?

#AIEthics #ProfessionalNetworking #DueDiligence