I got a lot of feedback on my last post — The Human Touch Is Not Going to Save Your Job From AI — and one response kept showing up over and over:
"AI isn't going to impact my business. My customers don't want to talk to AI. They want to talk to a human."
Let me be very clear: looking backwards, and even in today's landscape, I 100% agree.
I've yelled at airline bots. I've fought with support chatbots. I've sat through "press 1, press 2, press 3" phone trees that made me want to throw my phone across the room. They all suck. Of course customers prefer a human. I prefer a human.
But here's where I think a lot of business owners are getting tripped up: the reason customers prefer a human isn't because they love humans. It's because the human is better. The human is the better option.
That's an important distinction. Because the question business owners are actually answering is, "Do my customers prefer the current version of AI?" That's the easy question. And the answer is no.
The right question is harder:
If AI could answer your customers' questions faster, resolve their issues quicker, sell to them more effectively, match their tone and dialect, and never put them on hold — would your customers still prefer a human?
I think the honest answer is no. Not in most cases. Not most of the time.
When AI can give me a real answer in five seconds instead of waiting on hold for twenty minutes, I'm picking the AI. When it can talk to me in my own cadence instead of forcing me to type into a tiny chat box, I'm picking the AI. When it knows my full history with the company instead of asking me to repeat my account number for the third time, I'm picking the AI.
Most business owners I talk to haven't even asked their customers this version of the question. They've only asked the easy one.
The bigger problem is a frame-of-reference problem. Most people, even sharp business owners, can only imagine a future that's about as good as today, with maybe some incremental improvement. Linear thinking. A little better next year, a little better the year after.
But that's not what's happening with AI.
What's happening is exponential. Doubling. AI call centers today are okay. What if in three months they're twice as good? In six months, four times as good? In nine months, eight times as good? In twelve months, sixteen times better than today?
Sixteen times better is almost impossible to picture. The human mind isn't wired to think that way. We round it down to "a little better." But that's not the curve we're on, especially with reinforcement learning, where these systems keep getting better at getting better.
So here's my message to every business owner writing off AI right now because you've talked to your customers and they prefer humans:
That tells you the technology isn't ready today. It does not tell you it won't be ready soon. And it definitely doesn't give you a green light to ignore it.
Stop asking, "Is AI ready to replace human communication with my customers?" Right now, in most cases, it isn't.
Start asking, "Am I prepared for when it is?"
Because for most businesses, that moment is coming sooner than later, and faster than anyone expects.