I feel like last year AI was all anyone could talk about.

It was coming for your job. Then it was helping you with your job. Then it was coming for your job again.

The chatter was constant. And exhausting. And at some point, it stopped being useful. There was so much of it that it became nearly impossible to tell what was signal and what was noise.

And oh boy, there was a lot of noise.

That noise pushed companies to over-index into AI far too quickly. Brands rushed to announce they were AI-first. Commercials started using AI. Customer service departments were replaced with chatbots almost overnight.

Not because it made the experience better. But because it made the spreadsheet look better.

Everyone became obsessed with efficiency.

How fast can this be? How cheap can this be? How many people can we replace? How much headcount can we cut without breaking things?

Efficiency became the default lens. And once that happens, everything starts to look like a process problem instead of a people problem.

Customers weren’t people anymore. They were tickets. Inputs. Rows in a CRM. Something to route, deflect, or resolve as quickly as possible.

But efficiency is an internal metric. Customers don’t feel it.

Customers feel friction. They feel indifference. They feel when they’re being rushed off the phone or pushed into a chatbot loop that clearly wasn’t designed to help them.

That’s why this was the wrong question.

Instead, companies should have been asking, “Is this serving the customer in the best way we can?”

Not “does this scale?” Not “does this reduce cost?”

But “does this make the experience better for the person on the other side?”

Most of the time, the honest answer was no.

Think about coffee.

You can optimize a coffee experience to be fast. Order ahead. No conversation. In and out. And for some people, that’s fine.

But the places people love, the places they come back to, aren’t just efficient. They’re human. Someone knows your name. Someone notices you haven’t been in for a while. Someone treats you like you matter.

Most people will go back to (and tell their friends about) the places they feel seen when they have the option.

That’s the lens AI should have been evaluated through.

According to PwC research, the majority of consumers feel companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience.

Harvard Business Review research has shown that customers who feel emotionally connected to a brand are significantly more valuable than those who are merely satisfied. But you don’t need me to tell you that. You can feel it.

If you’ve interacted with an AI chatbot in the last year, you probably felt it. You weren’t helped. You were routed. You were stalled. You were reminded you weren’t talking to a person. 

This leads me to this year, and where AI sits for me personally and for our agency.

We need to be more human, less robot.

This doesn’t mean abandoning technology in the name of inefficiency. It means putting the customer first.

It means when someone calls, a human answers. When you email or comment on one of our client posts, a human writes back. When you see an actor in one of our posts, that was a real human who got paid to act.

People need to be seen. In a time when more people work from home and their social lives are increasingly reduced to Slack channels and group chats, this matters more than ever.

Your customers aren’t numbers on a P&L. They are people, and people respond well when they feel seen, taken care of, and heard.

Where AI, automation, and technology fit best is in the backend. The parts the customer doesn’t feel. The moment something feels automated or robotic, the experience breaks.

Stop thinking about how to turn your business into an industry‑specific version of a Burger King kiosk. Instead, think about your favorite restaurants. What do they do so well? How do they make you feel?

Because moving forward, when everyone has access to AI, it’s going to be the human touch that wins and keeps customers.

— Jordan