7 ms·

The Competitive Moat That AI Can't Replicate

142 points by speckx 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
Simulacra 5mo ago
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.
saithound 5mo ago
[dead]
mdorazio 5mo ago
An AI written post talking about the importance of human connection in the age of AI is hilarious.
- gblargg 5mo ago
  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.
  - loopmonster 5mo ago
    Even though they were fully booked from the phone bookings regardless
- LanceJones 5mo ago
  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?
  - ramraj07 5mo ago
    This particular article has the tell tale opus 4.8 smell of these short sentences. I think its mainly opus 4.8
  - bitwize 5mo ago
    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)
    - AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
      Hey, the LLMs had to pick up these patterns from somewhere. Embarrassingly, before LLMs, there were plenty of humans that wrote like this.
  - smallerize 5mo ago
    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.
  - _gmax0 5mo ago
    When did "X is built one marble at a time" become popular? Maybe search analytics can tell us.
    - smallerize 5mo ago
      Well, this isn't what I expected. (And it only goes up to 2022.) https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=one+marble+at+a+time&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=one+marble+at+...
  - clark_dent 5mo ago
    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.
- netsharc 5mo ago
  Not sure if AI slop, or LI (LinkedIn) slop...
- warpech 5mo ago
  (As a non-native speaker) I didn’t notice that, I love this post and even shared it with my team
- ashishact 5mo ago
  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.
  - ashishact 5mo ago
    I normally have conversation with opus - And I enjoy it. Maybe I am getting fine-tuned.
    - tootubular 5mo ago
      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.
      - Folcon 5mo ago
        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/ https://xkcd.com/810/
      - Flashtoo 5mo ago
        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.
- outlier99 5mo ago
  Yep https://www.pangram.com/history/d3fd8f73-af8a-4cdb-968e-7346b04ded7e?ucc=gcJNTeQdxsV https://www.pangram.com/history/d3fd8f73-af8a-4cdb-968e-7346...
  - drob518 5mo ago
    Oops… gotta say that I agree with the general message of the article, though.
    - computerphage 5mo ago
      Why do you agree?
      - drob518 5mo ago
        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.
  - kangalioo 5mo ago
    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?
    - computerphage 5mo ago
      https://www.pangram.com/research/how-it-works https://www.pangram.com/research/how-it-works
    - raincole 5mo ago
      > How do we know this We don't. Pangram is HN's astrology. It has 99.99% accuracy (according to Pangram.)
- holistio 5mo ago
  > 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.
- shantnutiwari 5mo ago
  "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.
  - phpnode 5mo ago
    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.
flax 5mo ago
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.
- fidotron 5mo ago
  > I want transactional interactions that actually work. One of the great lies of the modern world is that this actually happens.
- ygouzerh 5mo ago
  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.
  - fxtentacle 5mo ago
    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.
  - elevaet 5mo ago
    Or Gojek!
  - ValentineC 5mo ago
    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.
ygouzerh 5mo ago
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)
Animats 5mo ago
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.
- ttoinou 5mo ago
  Do you still experience hallucinations from AI in 2026 ?
  - Animats 5mo ago
    Yes. [1] [1] https://users.rust-lang.org/t/crossbeam-channel-try-send-into-bounded-0-queue/140770 https://users.rust-lang.org/t/crossbeam-channel-try-send-int...
    - ttoinou 5mo ago
      Who would ever use microsoft copilot out of their free will ? I mean do you get hallucinations with real 2026-era LLMs ?
wrs 5mo ago
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!
- xg15 5mo ago
  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.
majormajor 5mo ago
> 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?)
- pixl97 5mo ago
  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.
- zerotolerance 5mo ago
  It is AI generated.
  - Noumenon72 5mo ago
jameslk 5mo ago
> 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
DrewADesign 5mo ago
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.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
saturn8601 5mo ago
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.
- abirch 5mo ago
  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.
mpalmer 5mo ago
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.
yieldcrv 5mo ago
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
- cindyllm 5mo ago
  [dead]
xg15 5mo ago
> 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.
trhway 5mo ago
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...
jareklupinski 5mo ago
> the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door. > 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. wait, so the restaurant owner's answer to a fully booked schedule is to... change everything? clearly whatever is happening is working
- eterm 5mo ago
  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.
  - zahlman 5mo ago
    > No X. No Y. Just Z. is another noted LLM-ism.
lowbloodsugar 5mo ago
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.
ElProlactin 5mo ago
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.
oliwarner 5mo ago
Starts with a suspiciously faithful synopsis of The Bear 2x07 "Forks". Great episode but it's a bit sus.

142 points by speckx 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

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.

saithound 5mo ago

[dead]

mdorazio 5mo ago

An AI written post talking about the importance of human connection in the age of AI is hilarious.

gblargg 5mo ago
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.
- loopmonster 5mo ago
  Even though they were fully booked from the phone bookings regardless
LanceJones 5mo ago
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?
- ramraj07 5mo ago
  This particular article has the tell tale opus 4.8 smell of these short sentences. I think its mainly opus 4.8
- bitwize 5mo ago
  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)
  - AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
    Hey, the LLMs had to pick up these patterns from somewhere. Embarrassingly, before LLMs, there were plenty of humans that wrote like this.
- smallerize 5mo ago
  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.
- _gmax0 5mo ago
  When did "X is built one marble at a time" become popular? Maybe search analytics can tell us.
  - smallerize 5mo ago
    Well, this isn't what I expected. (And it only goes up to 2022.) https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=one+marble+at+a+time&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=one+marble+at+...
- clark_dent 5mo ago
  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.
netsharc 5mo ago
Not sure if AI slop, or LI (LinkedIn) slop...
warpech 5mo ago
(As a non-native speaker) I didn’t notice that, I love this post and even shared it with my team
ashishact 5mo ago
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.
- ashishact 5mo ago
  I normally have conversation with opus - And I enjoy it. Maybe I am getting fine-tuned.
  - tootubular 5mo ago
    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.
    - Folcon 5mo ago
      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/ https://xkcd.com/810/
    - Flashtoo 5mo ago
      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.
outlier99 5mo ago
Yep https://www.pangram.com/history/d3fd8f73-af8a-4cdb-968e-7346b04ded7e?ucc=gcJNTeQdxsV https://www.pangram.com/history/d3fd8f73-af8a-4cdb-968e-7346...
- drob518 5mo ago
  Oops… gotta say that I agree with the general message of the article, though.
  - computerphage 5mo ago
    Why do you agree?
    - drob518 5mo ago
      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.
- kangalioo 5mo ago
  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?
  - computerphage 5mo ago
    https://www.pangram.com/research/how-it-works https://www.pangram.com/research/how-it-works
  - raincole 5mo ago
    > How do we know this We don't. Pangram is HN's astrology. It has 99.99% accuracy (according to Pangram.)
holistio 5mo ago
> 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.
shantnutiwari 5mo ago
"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.
- phpnode 5mo ago
  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.

flax 5mo ago

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.

fidotron 5mo ago
> I want transactional interactions that actually work. One of the great lies of the modern world is that this actually happens.
ygouzerh 5mo ago
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.
- fxtentacle 5mo ago
  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.
- elevaet 5mo ago
  Or Gojek!
- ValentineC 5mo ago
  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.

ygouzerh 5mo ago

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)

Animats 5mo ago

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.

ttoinou 5mo ago
Do you still experience hallucinations from AI in 2026 ?
- Animats 5mo ago
  Yes. [1] [1] https://users.rust-lang.org/t/crossbeam-channel-try-send-into-bounded-0-queue/140770 https://users.rust-lang.org/t/crossbeam-channel-try-send-int...
  - ttoinou 5mo ago
    Who would ever use microsoft copilot out of their free will ? I mean do you get hallucinations with real 2026-era LLMs ?

wrs 5mo ago

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!

xg15 5mo ago
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.

majormajor 5mo ago

> 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?)

pixl97 5mo ago
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.
zerotolerance 5mo ago
It is AI generated.
- Noumenon72 5mo ago

jameslk 5mo ago

> 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

DrewADesign 5mo ago

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.

deleted 5mo ago

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saturn8601 5mo ago

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.

abirch 5mo ago
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.

mpalmer 5mo ago

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.

yieldcrv 5mo ago

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

cindyllm 5mo ago
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xg15 5mo ago

> 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.

trhway 5mo ago

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...

jareklupinski 5mo ago

> the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door. > 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. wait, so the restaurant owner's answer to a fully booked schedule is to... change everything? clearly whatever is happening is working

eterm 5mo ago
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.
- zahlman 5mo ago
  > No X. No Y. Just Z. is another noted LLM-ism.

lowbloodsugar 5mo ago

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.

ElProlactin 5mo ago

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.

oliwarner 5mo ago

Starts with a suspiciously faithful synopsis of The Bear 2x07 "Forks". Great episode but it's a bit sus.