The Daily Journal
By the Ocean
Cloudy 78 Degrees
4:57 a.m.
As businesses continue to embarrass themselves by allowing A.I. to communicate with their prospects, clients and customers, it’s interesting to watch all of the ways that the latest and greatest shiny gizmos drive sales away.
If you haven’t noticed, humans are rather tired of fake.
So when you show up to ask a question about a product or service and you’re served an A.I. bot who clearly doesn’t understand what it’s talking about, do you think that INCREASES the probability of a sale or DECREASES it?
My wife experienced that yesterday while looking for some surf related product. To say she is dealing with a surf addiction would be an understatement. As I write this, it’s dark outside and we’re just minutes away from leaving for another surf lesson. (It’s weird that the Matrix has no word for something you love to do all the time that actually adds value to your life. Funny. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.)
She had some questions about a product on a website and was served with a delightful A.I. bot to answer them. If A.I. understood anything, maybe that would have been helpful. But since A.I. is just a brute force magic trick that creates the illusion of understanding where there is none, your results may vary! And they did.
The bot sure did try though. After the “dumber than an idiot” level exchange with the bot, my wife mentioned she wasn’t getting her questions answered. Good news though! The A.I. bot “sensed” (funny) the lack of satisfaction and decided to send her an email! It analyzed itself and told her, “YOU ARE RIGHT! I didn’t answer your question.” So helpful.
If you do this to your prospects, customers and clients, they will leave. And most likely, they will not bother to tell you. Despite what your intentions are for using this technology, the message that gets received is “WE DON’T CARE ENOUGH ABOUT YOU TO DO THIS OURSELVES.”
Your prospects, customers and clients don’t care what the news says, what the gurus say, what the bro podcasters think or what the investment analysts are paid to parrot about what a miracle “A.I.” is or is not. They only know what they feel.
And humans don’t like being treated like they don’t matter. This should be obvious to everyone. But there are a lot of people whose revenue and reputation depend on it NOT being obvious. Many other people are just lazy and want something for nothing.
Treat your people like humans or they will move to the folks who do. It is very simple.
And if you can’t write, learn how to do it. Humans have been learning this for centuries. If you can talk, you can write. And that investment of time and effort will catapult you far above the lazy people who forget that COMPETENCE and MASTERY are not available from a borg that delivers homogenized everything. So that means, if you’re choosing A.I. to do the writing, you are choosing AVERAGE. And that’s not going to lead to anything good.
If you want brilliance, if you want to get paid for that, YOU have to produce it.