Humans still matter

Headlines blare gloom and doom about the impact of AI on employment and our lives. We hear about layoffs linked directly to AI. We hear about AGI—artificial general intelligence—a term many people use, but few can agree on a definition or a timeline. Simply put, it’s a human-like intelligence that could arrive soon, or perhaps not for decades, or maybe never. Nobody really knows. Yet amid all of this noise, one message keeps surfacing: humans, not the latest technology, should be at the center of every business decision, whether that involves employees or customers.

If you think about the core of most any business, it involves people creating products and finding ways to market and sell them to other humans. As much as AI dominates the conversation these days, that fundamental reality hasn’t changed, and likely won’t anytime soon.

AI aside, appealing to people means thinking about them, caring for them, and engaging with them in meaningful, positive ways. Yet managers are also taught to focus on the bottom line, and people cost money. For some, the prospect of replacing people with bots is appealing—a capitalist dream of always-on productivity with no downtime. But every business decision brings unintended consequences, and going all in on AI is no exception.

Not so fast

It turns out that people prefer to deal with other people in a lot of instances. We’ve already seen companies trying to replace human workers with bots, getting burned, and walking it back. Eleanor Warnock, writing in a Sift OpEd, pointed out that these leaders found out the hard way that customers and employees need to come first, even in the face of a massive technological shift we are experiencing at the moment. Those leaders who fail to realize that are going to hear about it.

“The backlash will come, whether that is from customers who are fed up with not being able to get through to a human or employees who feel undervalued and exploited,” Warnock wrote. She was referring, in this case, to two companies in particular that had publicly embraced AI, Klarna and Duolingo, only to backtrack when faced with the grim reality that you can’t lose sight of people in the business equation. Nor can you think that AI is the answer to every question. It’s not and it shouldn’t be.

Last year, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski very publicly stated his company would be replacing customer service employees with AI, only to find that it resulted in a big backlog of unresolved problems and a lot of unhappy customers. He recently announced plans to hire human agents again. 

In Duolingo’s case, CEO Luis von Ahn announced that he wanted to replace human employees with bots and was forced to respond to angry customers who were none too happy with his decision. Like Siemiatkowski, he responded to customer anger by reversing course. “To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are in fact continuing to hire at the same speed as before). I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality,” he wrote in a mea culpa post on LinkedIn.

“It's important to remember that the voice of the customer is the only voice that really matters and they deserve to have greater attention."

~Brian Solis

Maintaining the focus on your customers

Brian Solis, head of global innovation at ServiceNow, and author of eight business books, sees it in similar terms. You should welcome new ways of doing things, but keep your eye firmly focused on your customers and employees, or you could lose your way, as these executives found. “It's important to remember that the voice of the customer is the only voice that really matters and they deserve to have greater attention," Solis said. That means that ultimately, no matter how advanced technology becomes, businesses that prioritize genuine human connection have the best chance of sustaining lasting loyalty and growth.

As author and marketing guru Seth Godin bluntly put it in his blog last year, every business has a choice to engage or not. “[Customer Service] is either part of your strategy or you’re paying for your mistake,” he said. Klarna and Duolingo certainly learned that lesson along the way, didn’t they?

Nikkia Revillac, who has held senior leadership roles at major brands like Netflix, Twitter and Colgate-Palmolive and who often speaks about human-centric leadership and organizational transformation, offered a broader view. “In a world increasingly shaped by automation, the ultimate competitive advantage isn’t technological—it’s human. It’s the ability to deeply understand people and create the conditions where people can do their best work.”

It's impossible to miss the overarching theme here. As these thought leaders make clear, managers who overlook the human element do so at their own peril.

~Ron 

Featured image by Timon Studler on Unsplash