All credit for this post goes to Scott Gillum and his fantastic post: Why Relying on AI Won’t Improve Customer Experience. Reading it caused me to start reflecting on how much we misunderstand about AI and how we leverage it in selling. Without a doubt, AI will have a huge impact on both how we manage/lead our organizations and on how we effectively and efficiently engage our customers in their buying process.
Having said that, I worry that we miss the most important parts of those experiences and misunderstand AI’s ability to address those.
We don’t yet understand AI and it’s potential, we are in the very earliest days of AI, particularly Generative AI. In just the past couple of years, so much has changed. But the majority of it’s potential is yet to be seen.
AI can help us see things about our people and customers that we haven’t seen. It can provide analysis of data from past experiences. We can look at the performance of our people, we can get insights about our customers’ engagement with us, as well as much else in their digital lives. It can provide comparative analyses with other people in similar roles, other customer situations, and more. Because it can analyze thousands of more pieces of data than we can comprehend, it can see patterns invisible to us.
It can take mundane, tedious tasks and do them for us, theoretically freeing up our time for those things that are more important. Rather than doing the research ourselves, it can provide us the research we need. It can help us in our writing, our presentations, our analysis. It can help us in improving our ability to communicate with our people and our customers, though it is seriously limited in it’s ability to execute the communications without human intervention.
But AI has and, for some time, will continue to have serious and important limitations. It’s the human element. The need each of us has for human to human connection and engagement. The need each of us have for empathy, caring, understanding. The need to go beyond the facts and data to understand, “are we doing the right things in the right way?” The need to feel valued and heard, whether it’s within our own organizations or our customers’ need for this.
Our confidence in ourselves and our decisions doesn’t magically arise internally or from an analysis of the data. While those represent part of what drives our confidence, it is the validation that we get from others. People helping us make sure we are addressing the right issues. People engaging with us to improve our thinking, or change it. People who react and respond not only factually but emotionally.
AI should free us to engage with each other and our customers in more impactful ways. The key questions are, do we understand it’s importance? Do we care enough for ourselves and others to engage as human beings?
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