I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
That is something that AI is not giving us today. By design. Companies are not switching to AI customer service because it's better or cheaper for the same service. They are choosing to replace customer service with AI chat bots that simulate the customer service experience without actually providing the service part.
> I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
Every time a business tries to make a "connection" its really just an avenue to exploit or manipulate me. I've never had them making a connection for my benefit (i.e. take a hit to their bottom line).
I'm not asking for altruism but I am asking for them to drop the pretense and quit bullshitting me.
Then they’re doing it wrong. That’s a faux “connection” that just serves the business and not you. I would bet that if you experienced true connection, you’d love it, but you’ve been scammed by fraudsters so many times that you are suspicious of anything that doesn’t feel strictly transactional.
The grab app shows un-skippable ads. And some taxis even have ads "based on your interests" playing on a TV in front of your seat. I found their "no marketing" ;) to be almost too much.
I dunno, I talk to the Doordash bot, it gives me a refund for the failed delivery because it didn't score me as doing fraud, I don't care there was no human involved. It's certainly an upgrade over the menu-driven approach that has no room for deviation.
>> I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
I do want a connection. Because connection is what ensures that the transactional interactions continue to work outside of the "happy path". Connection is what ensures that you can return those expensive headphones you bought because extended use makes your neck hurt, even though the return window has passed.
I had read 80% of the post and loved it. Then I came to see few comments - Saw yours and now having difficulty reading further. That means:
1. AI has gotten better - or eventually most people would like reading AI generated content
2. Author is just using AI to post-process - content is original
I have definitely noticed other people using LLM-choice words, myself included, more frequently. It's a strange phenomenon to witness. Obviously the models got them from us first so there must've been some popularity there prior, but the boost is clear. Blast radius, load-bearing, shape, and so on. Or maybe they were always there and my confirmation bias is in high gear.
I feel like the author wrote like the full plan/ substance himself, and gave to an AI the formatting. It's quite fine for me so actually, as long as the substance make sense/is logical.
How does Pangram detect this? How do we know this is any more reliable than just asking any HN user to judge a text for AI signs, i.e. how is this more authoritative than the comments you're responding to?
Since I couldn't be bothered, I had AI read it and tell me the outcome: they did in fact go to online-only bookings, freeing the staff from the phones so they could help customers more.
I always wonder how people can tell. For this particular article, was it the thirty-four occurrences of em dashes with spaces on either side? Something else obvious?
It was the content. So many very specific claims with no source, just stuff being made up. I don't know who Brené Brown is, perhaps she specifically researches trust, but how curious that her daughter can raise a problem with trust, specifically cite two named behaviours that build trust, and then Brown just happens to have a database of trust-building behaviours to hand, that she hasn't even analysed, ready to output a teachable moment.
Articles of this type suggest a fun game: "LLM or Marketroid?" Because either one could have written it, and both are capable of about equivalent levels of original thought. (whoops did i just say that out loud)
This is great advice, as long as you remember you need both hospitality and service. At some point a warm relationship doesn’t compensate enough for a bad product.
I love that the staff at my little neighborhood bank remembers me, and was so warm and helpful when I had to open an estate account when my mom died, and sometimes I bring my favorite teller a latte on my way back from the coffee shop.
But I still switched my business account to Chase, because my little neighborhood bank’s website is stuck in about 2005, and I just couldn’t put up with it any longer!
> If every company uses the same AI tools to optimise the same metrics, the optimisation itself becomes commodity. Everyone has the same chatbot, the same personalisation engine, the same churn predictor. The floor rises for everyone simultaneously, which means relative advantage disappears. The only remaining differentiator — the actual moat — becomes the irreducibly human: genuine empathy in a crisis, a person who actually cares, a brand that feels run by real people who listen.
Yes, this is what every article proclaiming AI will be the end for human jobs completely misses. Ultimately businesses must compete and things that become scarce or harder to attain, such as human connection, will become their real differentiator. Businesses are still selling to humans at the end of the day.
This article was great and provides a lot of wonderful examples of how to build high touch businesses. It reminds me a lot of Tony Hsieh's book, Delivering Happiness, and his experiences building a high touch culture for Zappos to differentiate with the ecommerce businesses he was up against who all resorted to bad customer support, poor return experiences. A famous example being Tony calling into Zappos' support line pretending to be a customer ordering a pizza as a joke, and his customer support actually caring enough to ensure a pizza was delivered to him. Probably a book more relevant than ever
> He called the restaurant. He was put on hold for thirty minutes. When someone finally answered, they were apologetic but firm — the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door.
> In trying to humanise the process, he’d made it worse.
> Here’s where most stories would end with “so they moved everything online and fired the reservation staff.” That’s not what happened. They did move to online booking, but they kept the entire reservation team and repurposed them. These people now spent their days learning about the customers coming in that night. Who was celebrating a birthday? Who was on a first date? What had a regular not finished on their plate six months ago?
I have questions...
a) how does moving to online reservations help with "it's fully booked" if it's booked even before then?
b) what was "the entire reservation team" even doing that a phone call takes 30min to service and then just results in "nope we're full"?
In a lot of businesses, online reservations or tickets are scalper-prone, so I can absolutely see a desire to avoid that, and would be fully supportive of moving those things to phone or in-person. But that doesn't seem to be the case here, the story is just "He wanted the ritual of a human voice, the small exchange about an anniversary or a first date, the warmth of being recognised."
Which is plausible enough, but the details don't seem to add up. Is it even a true story? (Or is it the sort of plausible-but-internally-inconsistent thing you might get if you told an LLM to generate such a story about a restaurant?)
One thing I have a question: what about business that doesn't have hospitaly/B2C? Many exemples relies on the F&B business, which is quite special in the fact that one of the core value proposition is directly hospitality, so we could argue that "adding more hospitality" is actually their core business already.
But what about a company which is more in B2B, and where procurement will be more rationalized (e.g RFP, which is often regulated)?
One thing as well: this is moat from an organization point of view, but unfortunately not for the individual: soft skills are often easier to get than hard skills, and there is so already a competition on the job market for the client-facing roles, even before AI arrival: like Sales / Business Developers / Account Managers (or more internal roles to try to build something that the client would need, like Product Managers)
Because it's not reliable enough to let it do anything which might cost the service provider. This is the cost of hallucinations. You can't let the customer service AI issue refunds, or upgrade someone to a better room. Not yet, anyway. Agentic AI systems with any real power generate minor disasters on a regular basis.
I agree. AI and some of these type of digital platforms are making interactions more efficient, maybe ..less costly but efficiency isn’t the same thing as a real connection. Instead of investing in AI/digitization maybe it's better to invest in employee training and growth.
I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
That is something that AI is not giving us today. By design. Companies are not switching to AI customer service because it's better or cheaper for the same service. They are choosing to replace customer service with AI chat bots that simulate the customer service experience without actually providing the service part.
> I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
Every time a business tries to make a "connection" its really just an avenue to exploit or manipulate me. I've never had them making a connection for my benefit (i.e. take a hit to their bottom line).
I'm not asking for altruism but I am asking for them to drop the pretense and quit bullshitting me.
Then they’re doing it wrong. That’s a faux “connection” that just serves the business and not you. I would bet that if you experienced true connection, you’d love it, but you’ve been scammed by fraudsters so many times that you are suspicious of anything that doesn’t feel strictly transactional.
I’ll take “No true Scotsman” for $800 thank you Alex.
An "accountability sink" [0] where a major feature of the machine is to cast blame into the void.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
Definitely! One exemple is Grab, in all Southeast Asia: what people like is that the app is fluid, and will get you from A to B.
There is no marketing like Uber did sometimes of like: "personal service, free water bottle", and it's still killing it.
Of course, I personally always enjoy a chat with the driver, but many people I know prefer actually not talking.
The grab app shows un-skippable ads. And some taxis even have ads "based on your interests" playing on a TV in front of your seat. I found their "no marketing" ;) to be almost too much.
Or Gojek!
I dunno, I talk to the Doordash bot, it gives me a refund for the failed delivery because it didn't score me as doing fraud, I don't care there was no human involved. It's certainly an upgrade over the menu-driven approach that has no room for deviation.
> I want transactional interactions that actually work.
One of the great lies of the modern world is that this actually happens.
>> I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
I do want a connection. Because connection is what ensures that the transactional interactions continue to work outside of the "happy path". Connection is what ensures that you can return those expensive headphones you bought because extended use makes your neck hurt, even though the return window has passed.
I want a connection to quality products that last until they wear out (or are obsolete). Customer service is part of quality.
An AI written post talking about the importance of human connection in the age of AI is hilarious.
I had read 80% of the post and loved it. Then I came to see few comments - Saw yours and now having difficulty reading further. That means:
1. AI has gotten better - or eventually most people would like reading AI generated content 2. Author is just using AI to post-process - content is original
Anyway I did love the content.
I normally have conversation with opus - And I enjoy it. Maybe I am getting fine-tuned.
I have definitely noticed other people using LLM-choice words, myself included, more frequently. It's a strange phenomenon to witness. Obviously the models got them from us first so there must've been some popularity there prior, but the boost is clear. Blast radius, load-bearing, shape, and so on. Or maybe they were always there and my confirmation bias is in high gear.
I feel like the author wrote like the full plan/ substance himself, and gave to an AI the formatting. It's quite fine for me so actually, as long as the substance make sense/is logical.
What about the formatting seems indicative of AI generation? It just looks like normal long-form writing to me.
Yep https://www.pangram.com/history/d3fd8f73-af8a-4cdb-968e-7346...
How does Pangram detect this? How do we know this is any more reliable than just asking any HN user to judge a text for AI signs, i.e. how is this more authoritative than the comments you're responding to?
Oops… gotta say that I agree with the general message of the article, though.
Since I couldn't be bothered, I had AI read it and tell me the outcome: they did in fact go to online-only bookings, freeing the staff from the phones so they could help customers more.
Even though they were fully booked from the phone bookings regardless
> Here’s where I get frustrated, and this is the part of the article I’ve rewritten three times.
This was the chaotic evil part.
I always wonder how people can tell. For this particular article, was it the thirty-four occurrences of em dashes with spaces on either side? Something else obvious?
It was the content. So many very specific claims with no source, just stuff being made up. I don't know who Brené Brown is, perhaps she specifically researches trust, but how curious that her daughter can raise a problem with trust, specifically cite two named behaviours that build trust, and then Brown just happens to have a database of trust-building behaviours to hand, that she hasn't even analysed, ready to output a teachable moment.
The tiny sentence fragments are too much for me. They trip up the flow of the text.
Also the "not this, but that" structure is overused here.
When did "X is built one marble at a time" become popular? Maybe search analytics can tell us.
Well, this isn't what I expected. (And it only goes up to 2022.) https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=one+marble+at+...
This particular article has the tell tale opus 4.8 smell of these short sentences. I think its mainly opus 4.8
This one almost feels like the AI got stuck in a perseverating loop of "He <blank> the <blank>." <repeat>
This is followed up by a sprinkling of every possible punctuative shakeup: bold, em-dash, semicolon, colon, quote, etc.
Articles of this type suggest a fun game: "LLM or Marketroid?" Because either one could have written it, and both are capable of about equivalent levels of original thought. (whoops did i just say that out loud)
(As a non-native speaker) I didn’t notice that, I love this post and even shared it with my team
Not sure if AI slop, or LI (LinkedIn) slop...
This is great advice, as long as you remember you need both hospitality and service. At some point a warm relationship doesn’t compensate enough for a bad product.
I love that the staff at my little neighborhood bank remembers me, and was so warm and helpful when I had to open an estate account when my mom died, and sometimes I bring my favorite teller a latte on my way back from the coffee shop.
But I still switched my business account to Chase, because my little neighborhood bank’s website is stuck in about 2005, and I just couldn’t put up with it any longer!
> If every company uses the same AI tools to optimise the same metrics, the optimisation itself becomes commodity. Everyone has the same chatbot, the same personalisation engine, the same churn predictor. The floor rises for everyone simultaneously, which means relative advantage disappears. The only remaining differentiator — the actual moat — becomes the irreducibly human: genuine empathy in a crisis, a person who actually cares, a brand that feels run by real people who listen.
Yes, this is what every article proclaiming AI will be the end for human jobs completely misses. Ultimately businesses must compete and things that become scarce or harder to attain, such as human connection, will become their real differentiator. Businesses are still selling to humans at the end of the day.
This article was great and provides a lot of wonderful examples of how to build high touch businesses. It reminds me a lot of Tony Hsieh's book, Delivering Happiness, and his experiences building a high touch culture for Zappos to differentiate with the ecommerce businesses he was up against who all resorted to bad customer support, poor return experiences. A famous example being Tony calling into Zappos' support line pretending to be a customer ordering a pizza as a joke, and his customer support actually caring enough to ensure a pizza was delivered to him. Probably a book more relevant than ever
> He called the restaurant. He was put on hold for thirty minutes. When someone finally answered, they were apologetic but firm — the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door.
> In trying to humanise the process, he’d made it worse.
> Here’s where most stories would end with “so they moved everything online and fired the reservation staff.” That’s not what happened. They did move to online booking, but they kept the entire reservation team and repurposed them. These people now spent their days learning about the customers coming in that night. Who was celebrating a birthday? Who was on a first date? What had a regular not finished on their plate six months ago?
I have questions...
a) how does moving to online reservations help with "it's fully booked" if it's booked even before then?
b) what was "the entire reservation team" even doing that a phone call takes 30min to service and then just results in "nope we're full"?
In a lot of businesses, online reservations or tickets are scalper-prone, so I can absolutely see a desire to avoid that, and would be fully supportive of moving those things to phone or in-person. But that doesn't seem to be the case here, the story is just "He wanted the ritual of a human voice, the small exchange about an anniversary or a first date, the warmth of being recognised."
Which is plausible enough, but the details don't seem to add up. Is it even a true story? (Or is it the sort of plausible-but-internally-inconsistent thing you might get if you told an LLM to generate such a story about a restaurant?)
One thing I have a question: what about business that doesn't have hospitaly/B2C? Many exemples relies on the F&B business, which is quite special in the fact that one of the core value proposition is directly hospitality, so we could argue that "adding more hospitality" is actually their core business already.
But what about a company which is more in B2B, and where procurement will be more rationalized (e.g RFP, which is often regulated)?
One thing as well: this is moat from an organization point of view, but unfortunately not for the individual: soft skills are often easier to get than hard skills, and there is so already a competition on the job market for the client-facing roles, even before AI arrival: like Sales / Business Developers / Account Managers (or more internal roles to try to build something that the client would need, like Product Managers)
Why can't AI replicate that?
Because it's not reliable enough to let it do anything which might cost the service provider. This is the cost of hallucinations. You can't let the customer service AI issue refunds, or upgrade someone to a better room. Not yet, anyway. Agentic AI systems with any real power generate minor disasters on a regular basis.
I agree. AI and some of these type of digital platforms are making interactions more efficient, maybe ..less costly but efficiency isn’t the same thing as a real connection. Instead of investing in AI/digitization maybe it's better to invest in employee training and growth.