Several years ago for Christmas, we bought our son some cool hand tool-type toys from Tractor Supply. The quality of the tools fell somewhere between “robust tool for adults” and “junky kids’ toy.” His favorite turned out to be the shovel since it was the right heft and shape to do maximum boy damage around the yard.
Except some months on, I discovered the shovel in the garage, mis-shaped and dented. When I asked why it looked this way, he told me: “well,” he said, “it just sorta got that way when I was chopping wood.”
Needless to say, we had a conversation about tools. Tools are good things if they are used for the right job. But using the wrong tool for the wrong job ends up damaging the tool or, worse, ends up making the job more difficult than it was in the first place.
The same principle applies to tools in the business world. In this blog, we’ve discussed both the potentials and pitfalls of AI in business (particularly “generative” AI). Here we thought we’d discuss an overall takeaway about how the “human touch” will be increasingly important as we move forward.
Human Touch Required
Perhaps the most important takeaway about generative AI and business is this: the human touch is still important. In fact, as AI becomes more prevalent, it is not hard to imagine that the human touch may be MORE necessary for your business success. Consider a company (ACME, Inc) that decides it is going to maximize AI and automation for every conceivable process. They might save money on personnel and appear to be highly efficient. However, consider what that means for sales, customer service, product development, and strategic planning.
Customer service bots, for example, save precious time with routine, easily solve-able tasks. But what if one of ACME’s biggest clients has a moderately complex question? And what if they are met with an AI-bot “wall” while trying to contact ACME support? You know from your own experience that this is increasingly the case – that it is difficult to find an ACTUAL human being to talk to.
This same problem plays out all the time, and as companies increasingly automate processes, the problem will become worse (especially in the short term). This is why a company who still has “human touch” in the age of AI may be able to leverage that into an advantage over its peers. Of course, that company still needs to use AI to improve efficiencies, but it cannot do so at the expense of human touch.
The Role of Human Interaction in Trust and Expertise
In the previous blog on this topic, we discussed the Oxford scholars who predicted a decade ago the widespread prevalence of AI in our culture. Those Oxford scholars agree on the topic of human interaction. They argued in 2023 that “the bottom line is, as virtual social interactions are increasingly aided by algorithms, the premium on in-person interactions, which cannot be replicated by machines, will become even greater.”
Nate Fischer, CEO of New Founding, further connects the heavy use of AI to social trust. He says:
These developments [AI usage] will have far-reaching consequences. Schools and universities will face AI-generated submissions, undermining their traditional tests. Businesses will struggle to identify capable employees, as the credentials they relied on become watered down. Political leaders skilled at mastering their image in a TV context will find they no longer convey the same credibility and influence. The very concept of expertise—something people traditionally associated with professional-sounding tone and language—will lose the signal that has given credibility to its purveyors.
In other words, as society becomes accustomed to AI being used for EVERYTHING, people will trust less and less to what had been normal avenues and symbols of expertise. College degrees will be trusted less. Certificates will be trusted less. AI-generated resumes will be trusted less. Traditional marketing avenues will be trusted less. And on and on.
Human Trust as a Competitive Advantage
In this environment, the human touch could be vital as a differentiator between you and your competitors. “Good customer service” has been a common marketing refrain over the years such that it is no longer a distinguishable claim between companies. Some companies DO offer exceptional customer service but rarely is that a unique selling proposition anymore. However, in an age where trust information is low (in large part due to heavy AI usage), real, actual customer service (and other real human interaction at various touch points with customers) may end up being a true selling point.
Fisher drives this home:
Rather, the emergence of suitable alternative signals of credibility will become a central problem of our era. Two themes are likely to emerge as we look for new and reliable signals of credibility. First, we will see a rise in demand for the judgments of recognized leaders within communities that remain high-functioning and high-trust—in essence, a return to human communities as principal mediators of trust, as opposed to the more institutionalized intermediaries that dominated the 20th century.
Second, we will see a rise of signals requiring meaningful skin in the game—particularly courageous actions, which reflect risks that cannot be faked. While such signals may not guarantee truth or broader competence, they at least signal something, in contrast with the increasing meaninglessness of images and words. This alone will draw attention and, with it, the ability to persuade and build broader credibility.
Balancing Efficiency with the Human Touch
As we have been emphasizing over and over, you must utilize automation in ways that will save your business time and money. At the same time, you must consider how you will maintain human interaction within your company. What does it look like to produce, to sell, and to support at high efficiency but with the human touch?
To illustrate this in a different way: A couple of years ago, we called a service provider about a problem at our house. When the technician showed up, he (a) loudly spoke over my wife while she described the problem and (b) checked his phone A LOT during his visit. He also ended up misdiagnosing the problem, which ended up being fixed by someone else in his company. A technician better trained in human interaction would have established better trust. But that company has a long-established reputation in the community, which went a long way in our continuing with their service. The company itself had community trust. Had this been our first interaction with that company, we would have quickly dropped them for another provider. Leveraging your human trustworthiness in a digital age could be a path to greater success.
Conclusion: Use AI to Improve Efficiency, but Don’t Forget the Human Touch
Use AI to improve efficiency. Practice AI oversight. Establish human trust. These ought to be principles every business owner carries forward into the AI arena. As my son learned with the toy shovel, good tools are only good tools when they are wielded in correct ways.