As LLM costs drop and capabilities grow, it's tempting to use them as the engine behind every customer interaction. But real-time generation is rarely essential. Most businesses face semantic-associative problems, not generative ones.
The issue isn’t a lack of words — it’s knowing which words work, when, and for whom.
Semantic-associative learning connects abstract message traits — day, time, channel, tone, category, value prop — to outcomes. That pattern discovery doesn’t need an LLM. In fact, LLMs can’t learn these cross-session patterns. The real need is for a strong tagging system, a big modular content library, and agents that learn from behavior instead of prompts.
And building a large content pool is easier than it sounds. Take a basic push notification for a food delivery app:
➡️ Header: "You deserve a great meal without the hassle of cooking."
➡️ Body: "Fresh tacos are just the thing for tonight. Open the app and start your order now."
Three sentences. That's a value proposition (self-care), an offering (tacos), and a call-to-action (order now).
🔀 Swap in laziness instead of self-care: "Staying in shouldn’t mean missing out on great food."
🔀 Swap tacos for sushi: "Your sushi fix is closer than you think."
🔀 Swap the CTA from buying to taking a look: "Browse the menu and see what looks good."
Write 10 versions of each component, all combinable — that's 1,000 unique messages from 30 lines of text. Add tone or structure variants, and the space scales fast. LLMs can help generate semantic alternates, but the value is in what happens after generation: learning which variants work.
Semantic tags create continuity. It’s not just about writing a self-care value prop — the agent must *know* it's self-care, not laziness or discovery or whatever else. Tags let agents generalize: if a message with value A fails, switch to B. If A works, pick another A alternate and explore different CTAs or tones.
❗ You're not testing messages, you're testing meaning.
The inventory exists to support learning — not because every message needs to be used, but to ensure agents never run out of something to say, even when neither you nor they can predict what they will need to say next.
For enterprises, this approach solves real constraints: brand consistency, legal review (easier to approve 30 snippets than 1,000 messages), and cost predictability (no LLM usage spikes during promos). Pre-generating modular content gives you personalization without blowing up your workflow or governance.
Agentic systems need to stay expressive and adaptive, without reinventing content every time, and without outsourcing behavior modeling to an LLM. Just agents, learning from outcomes, pulling from a tagged pool.
The intelligence is in the association. Not the generation.
