The Competitive Moat That AI Can't Replicate | Hacker News Reader

The Competitive Moat That AI Can't Replicate

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142 pointsspeckx123 comments

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 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.

Some of the headings are very AI-cliche: "Hospitality Is a Dialogue, Service Is a Monologue"; "AI Raises the Floor. Humans Raise the Ceiling"; "Your Employees Are the Moat. The Compounding Is Invisible."

The author didn't use headings like that in their 2024 blog posts.

I can only speak for myself here, but if I feel like I've read a whole paragraph that should have been half a sentence, that's my signal there's possibly AI generated content in there

Have you read any literature ever? Outside of technical and business docs..

The intro section reeks of LLM slop:

> 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.

If that was written by a human, it's embarrassing.

I'm always curious what types of books people like when they say they liked reading AI, so what were the last few books you've fully read + enjoyed?

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.

One I've started noticing is the "quotation marks around a phrase awkwardly trying to bundle a concept" thing. Like all LLM cliches it's something that has been used in writing for a long time, but I've seen it so much more recently. I think lots of people have picked this up from seeing LLMs use it. But like you said, who knows.

I do have a sneaking suspicion it's a mix of things, I'm at the point now that I do get a bit of an odd feeling whenever I'm reading AI produced content

I suspect over time it will get good enough that I'll need a larger sample size to identify it, however that won't solve what I think of as the "why does this need to exist" problem, I've noticed that a fair bit of AI content hits that mark, it can be fun, but I've not experienced that feeling of engaging with something that's been well thought out / executed, maybe we'll hit that point[0], but I suspect it will take a while

-[0]: https://xkcd.com/810/

AI has got better.

It read to me to be entirely generated. The lack of details that people would normally mention tripped my spidey-sense. ( Who wouldn't name-check the restaurant in the opening paragraph? )

A double check, the author appearing to take up blogging in 2023, mostly about data science, with all the tell-tale signs of generated posts.

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?

https://www.pangram.com/research/how-it-works

> How do we know this

We don't. Pangram is HN's astrology. It has 99.99% accuracy (according to Pangram.)

They claim it has a very low false-positive rate, which is meaningfully more nuanced than "accuracy".

"Detect AI-generated content with 99.98% accuracy." -pangram themselves

you are being downvoted but yeah, all these ai detection tools are astrology. Fancy sciency looking, but still crap

The downvotes are understandable. People really wish there is a reliable way to detect AI-gened content. If there is such a tool thew Show HN post will break the record of the post score.

But there isn't and won't be such a tool. As a fallback people defend Pangram etc. Posting Pangram scores in comments is fundamentally no difference than posting ChatGPT responses in comments, and it's quite hilarious that the former is normalized on HN.

Oops… gotta say that I agree with the general message of the article, though.

Why do you agree?

Because I think that a world that is increasingly isolated by technology and divided by ideology is craving authentic personal interaction with real humans. And I think that’s something AI will not be able to duplicate because it requires real human beings.

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 is the em dashes and the excessive wordiness as well as a lot of "not this, but that".

Eg:

"Not dramatically. Just quietly. " -- This is filler words. Whether it's dramatic or quiet has no relevance to the point they're making.

It also loves threes: "Well-modelled, properly sourced, beautifully visualised to requirements" - again, all irrelevant. The point they're making is that it's measuring the wrong thing, not that "beautifully visual things can be incorrect".

"There’s a piece of this conversation that most leaders miss, and it’s the part I care about most" - this hook of "most people miss" it is very common in AI writing.

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.

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)

Hey, the LLMs had to pick up these patterns from somewhere. Embarrassingly, before LLMs, there were plenty of humans that wrote like this.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brené_Brown

I am not sure if you posted a brilliant, subtle joke... or if you're demonstrating the exact behavior that you suggest is a flag of inauthenticity.

In the article, she wasn't introduced as a researcher at all, but suddenly "She went back to her research data...". This totally smells like an LLM refactor where it re-emits surface level details, but completely misses the key beats that tie ideas together across a story.

So, failure to do research and ensure a coherent mental model leads to erroneous inferences… for humans as well :)

What's your point? Yes, humans and AIs CAN make similar errors. However, continuity and context churn at this level is the sort of error that humans make rarely and AIs make constantly.

By itself it is not a sure sign of LLM output, but along with other signals it is highly suggestive.

This particular article has the tell tale opus 4.8 smell of these short sentences. I think its mainly opus 4.8

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 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.

Well, sometimes there's flat-out nonsense that seems to have been written purely to back into the author's thesis:

    You cannot design an algorithm that eavesdrops on dinner conversation and dispatches someone to buy a street hot dog, because the person on the receiving end would immediately sense the machinery of it.

But usually there's also:

- Word count hovering between four and five thousand words - Dramatic/narrative section titles - "No X, no Y. Just Z"

Last but certainly not least, there's the Lists of Exactly Three Things. I counted literally thirty in this piece. Examples:

    - "...the ritual of a human voice, the small exchange about an anniversary or a first date, the warmth of being recognised."
    - "Who was celebrating a birthday? Who was on a first date? What had a regular not finished on their plate six months ago?"
    - "You can’t purchase it, automate it, or accelerate it with a clever marketing campaign."
    - "...forgive outages, laugh off a late delivery, stay through a price increase."
    - "...the food arrives hot, the bill is accurate, the room is clean."
    - "You notice, you adjust, you respond."

I personally thought to myself "written by AI" after this part:

... 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.

I'm sure some people write this way, but most don't. And AI writes this way.

(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...

"An AI written post"

And the llm witch hunt crowd are here. "I dont like the post so it must be AI."

This is getting really tiring. I keep getting downvoted but I will keep pointing out this sucks -- no criticism, no challenging of ideas, just shit post "This is AI" and move on.

It's very clearly written by AI, which means that the thoughts expressed are not novel and the story told cannot be trusted. How can you expect people to spend time digesting the content if the author did not spend time writing it? It would be more honest to show the prompt, or the unpolished draft.

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.

Even the first story in the article sounds gross and creepy to me "The team became mini-concierges. Every guest walked in to find someone who knew them — not in a creepy, surveillance-state way, but in the way a good friend remembers what you’re going through."

I'm not going through anything. I just want some dinner.

And to be clear, the only reason they are doing this is strictly transactional. Good friends don't ask you to pay the bill at the end of dinner.

I thought of an example of how this should work.

My parents used to go to the same restaurant every Friday night, for many many years. A little chit chat at the register each visit, it doesn't take long before you actually enjoy seeing that person. I began to suspect they continued going just so they had an excuse to see their friends.

You can't engineer these relationships, but you can encourage your staff to be open to a little chit chat. Make sure your team has the time and energy to be friendly. Your team has to be happy, and its needs to show.

I have no problem with the idea that you are going fill your place with good vibes so people actually want to go and hang out there!

I also had an older relative who took me to a nice restaurant several years ago. He had gone to that same restaurant since the 1970s and even though it had changed names over the years, he usually asked for the same waiter, an older man who had worked there for decades. They had chatted about their kids and other things in life. Maybe they weren't the most intimate of friends, but I've felt this same desire in some coffee shops and restaurants, where I want to talk to the same employee again and catch up on at least a couple of things we've discussed before. Maybe we don't do that with every business transaction, but it's nice to experience every now and then.

We used to have a holiday home in Cornwall when I was young. My father used to have a pint or two at the local pub most evenings when we were there, and we were there 3-4 weeks every year. Eventually we sold the house and stopped going.

My father happened to go back there about 15 years later, randomly on a road trip through Cornwall and thought he'd stop in for a pint for old times' sake. On walking through the door, the barman said "hello Simon, good to see you again, pint of the usual?".

I wonder how many people call in to have a pint at the pub purely because of that barman. I wonder if that pub has survived the cull of British pubs purely because of that barman.

My parents go to a kitbar (wine bar with open kitchen and waiters/bartenders who cook) every Wednesday night and have for a decade. They know the staff and have friendly chats with most of the people who work that shift, and it's a nice break in the week for them to get to chat with some young people who aren't their descendants. I come along when I'm in town, and everybody seems happy and cheerful. People work that kind of job, as opposed to, say, data center technician (a big career in that area) because they don't mind making connections with strangers.

>Good friends don't ask you to pay the bill at the end of dinner.

it goes both ways. Good friends aren't expected to be free-loaders.

Unless you can give a specific example of a "true connection", I don't think they would.

To "go beyond their expectations" requires understanding what they expected to begin with. They just told you that they want a transaction, not a sales pitch or series of intrusions. Things are considered trivial when they do not fit that person's lifestyle. Doing a whole lot of "yes and", rough personality profiling, or goal guessing isn't going to cut it either.

Many people just want to be left the hell alone. Many people have even shouted from the rooftops they'd pay absurd money to be left the hell alone. I guess nobody wants to make money, nor provide a "true connection".

I’ll take “No true Scotsman” for $800 thank you Alex.

> I’ll take “No true Scotsman” for $800 thank you Alex.

One valid use of "true" means "genuine", "loyal", and/or "faithful". Thus making the sentence fragment "if you experienced true connection" tantamount to "if you experienced genuine connection."

There are many businesses I frequent where I have a "true connection" with the people representing same, from well-known national chains to sole proprietorships.

Asserting the existence of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy in this context is inapplicable.

I mean, I feel like that's what kentm is saying.

Businesses say they're trying to build "connection", but all they care about is getting customers to spend more and remain loyal to them. They don't care about connecting, which is why they will always fail.

You remind me of a hotel stay in Asia I had. After 10 minutes in the room, I get a WhatsApp message: "Welcome Mr. netsharc. How do you find the room?" (it was more verbose than this). It's from a business account which is the hotel (it's part of an international chain). I wanted to reply "Fine, but I don't want to talk to a bot. Leave me the hell alone." but thought it would upset the person on the other side since the country runs on politeness.

I imagine if I did reply like that there'd be some profuse apologizing, to which I'd think "Yeah, yeah, whatever, just leave me alone.".

All the businesses asking for a rating after I interacted with them also piss me off. Or worse, apps. I give them a bad rating on the play store with the text that the low score is due to the "Spam begging for app store ratings."

It is particularly bad when they use their workers as human shields. "If you are satisfied with my service please leave a 5star review, my name is Samantha, we get in trouble for less than 5 stars".

> All the businesses asking for a rating after I interacted with them also piss me off.

Singapore Airlines automatically emails passengers after a flight asking for a Net Promoter Score rating [1].

I have a feeling those ratings are mostly unseen, and cabin crew have chimed in that those ratings are unlikely to affect their promotions in any way.

What does help with their career is qualitative feedback written in through their feedback form.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score

> I've never had them making a connection for my benefit (i.e. take a hit to their bottom line).

I have. Go to a car place, build a rapport and the guy will likely apply discounts to your order. Go to the same place, make sure they know you and they'll give you discounts or extras because they know you're a repeat customer.

Many retail workers have some discretion. They're the front line workers. If you tell a manager at McDonalds that he's gotta listen to you yell for 15m to make the company an extra $10, that's not a trade they're willing to make. Hell he would even take it out of his own wallet if he had to (I would).

The whole "businesses do everything for their bottom line" is just some MBA bs and not at all how real businesses work.

I feel bad for all the people in this thread that apparently have never had a business do something nice for them for the sake of doing something nice.

I've had waiters throw in dessert because we had a good chat, store attendants give me free stuff because I mentioned a problem I had, even big chain employees will go above and beyond just because. All of this with no expectation of reciprocity. Really, I have concrete examples of all where the person helping had no reasonable expectation that I would come back.

If your whole life is purely transactional, and no one is giving you extra, it's time to look at how you move through the world. The problem might be you.

I have to wonder if there's something regional to this.

I used to live in a walkable neighborhood in a southern city, and I had several workers and owners at the businesses on my block who were chatty and we got along well. I tipped a dollar for my coffee every time at a local cafe, and the baristas would give me free coffees or ring up my coffee as a refill. The staff and several customers would often get into chats and I made a few friends just from going to that cafe in the afternoons a few weekdays a week.

> I do not want a "connection" with a business.

That's because we don't make connections with businesses - we make connections with people. That one nice hair dresser. The pharmacist that goes out of her way to make sure my mom's medicines are right. A cashier that's just pleasant to talk with.

Years ago I did most of my grocery shopping at Target. I cared almost nothing about Target the chain. Or Target the super store. I did care about Betty the checker and wanted to know how her grandkids were doing this week.

this is the only worthwhile comment in this thread

We must turn back the tide on American microwave culture. Life isn't just about my time, my money...we share life with others, and life is so much better because of it.

I invite you to watch this entertaining FortNine video about buying a motorcycle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbr3JZAXDxA

"How to Rip Off the Dealership - Bastard Negotiating Tactics"

Without giving too much away, I liked this approach so much that when I bought my last motorcycle, I found a Kenco-equivalent in the Bay Area. It was a fantastic buying experience and I'm so glad I did.

High dollar purchases are stressful and a human touch, from someone that is genuinely interested in not only this sale but the next one, really helps.

Plus, if you buy a bike from a place like that, and something goes wrong, you are almost guaranteed to have it made right without having to fight about it like at a big dealer.

Me neither. I just want a business to get my stuff done in a standard way. Clear pricing upfront and no haggling. No surprise. If I hire someone to take care my yard, then take care of the yard. The price is reasonable. The plants thrive. The lawn is green. The irrigation system just works and does not leak. Connection, what connection?

What is the standard way? There are details which requires having a conversation and a relationship.

I certainly don't want a service to come early morning and wake up my kids or in the afternoon polluting the whole neighborhood with noise and fumes when I want to spend time outside.

Well, there's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn2933vMylY

An "accountability sink" [0] where a major feature of the system or machien is to try to disclaim any responsibility and cast blame into the void.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine

>> 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.

Note that for the businesses mentioned in the article, the service is the product.

I don't care about service at a gas station - I want to fill my tank, pay, and get out. It's different when I take it to the mechanic - it's a rather old car, and I appreciate them talking intelligently about what the options are and what repairs they would suggest.

If I was getting 8 $ burritos with clearly marked ingredients and total automation end to end, I would gladly work with such a variant of Chipotle as well, even if it cuts workforce by 80% in such a scenario.

Frivolous employment maximisation with words like human connection do not make sense for survival necessities. It works better with discretionary spending

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.

I choose Grab mainly because I always have installed for GrabPay payments. Sometimes I use Gojek (often unloaded because my phone doesn't have much storage) because it's cheaper.

I avoid first-party taxi apps because they're shit and do dumb stuff like charge a 10% surcharge for credit card payments. They could get away with it 20 years ago, but I'm so glad Uber, Grab, and all the others are eating their lunch.

Or Gojek!

> I want transactional interactions that actually work.

One of the great lies of the modern world is that this actually happens.

I want a connection to quality products that last until they wear out (or are obsolete). Customer service is part of quality.

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.

Yea, on the same note I've had to call the cable company for internet outages a few times recently and the AI system handled the situation well. A few times it was neighborhood outages that it saw. One other time the system reset the modem configuration and the system came up, and one time it saw the interface on the modem was receiving errors and switched me over to a human to send a truck.

It really was much better than most cable related tech calls I've had.

The real issue is that you have to contact them at all.

It's been at least 5 years since I last got in contact with my ISP/cable provider. It took a few minutes for them to reply to my email (15 minutes on new years eve after hours) because a real human always replies. They can provide good service because the product is good enough to not need a call centre's worth of employees to deal with a queue of angry customers.

The area I live in has tons of house construction and all but one of the calls was because of external construction issues in the end. Doesn't matter how good your product is when morons with backhoes exist.

This is the difference between the people on this site broadly and everyone else broadly.

Depends on the company. Some companies have done a great job with their AI chat bots and I've been very impressed with the quality of service, even for queries which I consider quite complex.

i love connecting with a bookseller at a local independent bookstore. or a bartender. or a server. etc. such a more interesting life if you connect with people at the businesses in your community

> bartender, server

You’re not connecting with them. They put on a smile and listen to you hoping for a tip.

My wife is a bookseller. She doesn't get tips. She genuinely likes her customers... most of them anyways. Wouldn't like someone that thinks she's only doing it for money since she gets paid whether she's nice or not, but she would still be nice to them.

Maybe some people really do take pride in their work. Worth trying sometime maybe?

they charge my $60 bar tab for $20 and get tipped $20. then the bar closes and we hang out at the bar drinking for free. you should only comment on things that you know about. sorry you don't have the same experience

Every conceivable idea or option is eventually "optimized" for profit, and its possible maximum value form and meaning lost.

i dont know. I love basic humanity in my interactions. Thats why i eat at chick-fil-a and get coffee at starbucks. Not mcdonalds and dunkin donuts.

Just make it pleasant and human.

> the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door.

wait, so the restaurant owner's answer to a fully booked schedule is to... change everything?

clearly whatever is happening is working

It's completely made up, that kind of "wait, that doesn't make sense" is a hallmark of LLM writing.

It's got so good at writing generally that it catches us off-guard.

> No X. No Y. Just Z.

is another noted LLM-ism.

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!

Maybe what's also important is that the hospitality "relationship" grows on both sides and the customer has an understanding why the staff knows them.

I'm a regular at a few coffee shops near my home and I know the staff there "know" me - it's enough to have a pleasant conversation sometimes. But that works, because we have gotten to the "familiar face" part over a longer period and at the same time.

What the restaurant owner wants is that his staff somehow treat everyone like a regular and have spirited conversations about their life events, even if they just entered the restaurant for the first time.

The staff might even be able to pull that off, with a hefty dose of online profiling - but even then, I cannot see how anyone who isn't a completely detached business type wouldn't find this extremely creepy.

> 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?)

It is AI generated.

Yes, but "AI generated about a true story" is different from "AI generated and completely false". Putting business ideas in people's heads that have never worked actually harms them, worse than just wasting their time.

This story falls in the completely false camp. What restaurant can afford an entire reservations team? Why did they feel the need to do anything regarding reservations if they were always fully booked? It's just AI hallucinated slop.

There are still a lot of old people that love calling places and havent/won't get the hang of online systems.

Also restaurants of all sorts seem to have no one dedicated to answering the phone any longer. It's really problematic when you are trying to set up larger parties (9 to 12 people for example) at the last minute, which many places can handle but the online system won't do any more than 8 and there is no way to reach them other than messaging that may take a day.

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)

The internet, social media and AI has contributed to a society in which large numbers of people not only don't want a dialog, they feel uncomfortable with and try to avoid "unnecessary" human interaction.

As for the Apple Store, the one time I went into one, it was one of the weirdest, least pleasant retail experiences I had. It was chaos. One person was trying to help like 4 groups at a time and several people in the payment line were complaining about how long it was taking.

I feel like the author here has a point but maybe it's not as relevant to the modern retail world as he thinks.

The things I value most in any interaction with a business are competence, professionalism and value. If the people are polite/nice, that's great, but polite/nice doesn't help if the rest of the service sucks.

I don’t understand how someone can be so out of touch with both reality and technology. The points were: 1) the restaurant improved by paying people do research on their customers and 2) AI can’t provide meaningful relationships.

Anyone doing any kind of AI realizes that AI is likely better at doing (1) than humans, certainly good enough to fool most people. And anyone reading the news can’t avoid the panic stories about how “young people” are forming relationships with AI instead of people.

I'm genuinely trying to cut down on complaining about slop writing, but how are you going to say:

    Ask yourself where you’re using technology to replace human moments rather than amplify them

...right after you've subjected me to four thousand(!) words of preachy BS about connecting with humans instead of taking shortcuts?

Let me say it again because I'm really getting sick of recent blog word count inflation: if you publish four thousand words on some topic, you better be an expert, a strong writer, whatever. Find a better reason than SEO to go over 1500 words.

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.

Do you still experience hallucinations from AI in 2026 ?

Yes. [1]

[1] https://users.rust-lang.org/t/crossbeam-channel-try-send-int...

Who would ever use microsoft copilot out of their free will ? I mean do you get hallucinations with real 2026-era LLMs ?

For many businesses, AI is a mechanism to try to keep costs lower because the value of money is decreasing more and more. So if we don't implement AI and the business can't cut costs elsewhere? what's going to happen? There's going to be demand destruction and a potential lower quality of life.

As I see it there's are two directions with AI

   1) Cut the bottom line
   2) Grow the topline

Most firms have a backlog of features and design debt that AI can help address.

I rarely want that but for special occasions I love it

The staff at The French Laundry did this extremely well

They watched us before arrival and maybe stalked us online before that to have relevant things to talk about and ensure our experience was great

Now I can accept that from a 3 michelin star restuarant, but I dont want anybody else doing that

> 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 Delivering Happiness by the late Tony Hsieh 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

human-made products, human-provided service will be a luxury, like artisan crafted beer and jackets, etc. with all the unique imperfections and variations what are missing on the mass produced products and services. For example human made software (certified to not have any AI involvement) will have those cute quirks called bugs...

Starts with a suspiciously faithful synopsis of The Bear 2x07 "Forks".

Great episode but it's a bit sus.

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.

Don’t make up restaurant anecdotes if you’ve never worked in a restaurant. (Or, in this case, have your favorite chat bot do it.) A white collar worker could eat 3 meals per day in restaurants and still, very deliberately, have no idea what makes them tick. Even the fanciest restaurants operate nothing like a tech company. You just end up looking ridiculous to the bazillion people who have worked in them.

> Every guest walked in to find someone who knew them — not in a creepy, surveillance-state way, but in the way a good friend remembers what you’re going through.

...said every company that does creepy surveillance ever.

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