Recently, I sat in an AI for Sales conference. It was outstanding. But there was a demo portion of the conference where various vendors were talking about how their tools “helped” sellers.
We know the stories, do the research, do the prep, manage the calendars, send the follow-up, do the prospecting, handle the inbound. The lists of the things these tools do is astounding.
All of these are intended to free sellers up, focusing on customers.
Throughout the workshop, a theme kept coming up. Not AI helping sellers or relieving them of menial tasks. The emerging theme was “AI in the moment.”
Many of the vendors started talking about AI as your call and meeting companion. Whether a window on your PC, a chat on your mobile, or embedded in your glasses.
As I listened to all these agents participating in these customer calls, coaching and instructing us on the fly, the words to Harry Nilsson’s classic version of Fred Neil’s, “Everybody’s talkin’ at me, but I don’t hear a word they’re saying…..” kept going through my head.
It’s always been my practice in conversations with anyone, to be as “fully present” as I could possibly be. This meant no distractions. The focus is listening to, engaging, collaborating, and learning with the person I’m having the conversation with.
I consciously remove distractions; phones, devices (where it is F2F), anything. It’s usually me, the person, and the notebook I use to handwrite the notes.
The process of being fully present enables us to go beyond the words that are being said. It’s the way they say it, the intonation, pauses, body language. It’s recognizing the subtle shifts in attitudes and engagement.
Being present means understanding if the other is present or distracted and helping draw them back into the conversation.
Attention is a zero-sum game. Things that distract our attention from the person we seek to engage lower the quality of the conversation.
With AI in the moment, whether it’s a window on our PC, a chat on our device, eyeglasses or earpieces now create a second conversation. The conversation we are having with the individual and the conversation AI is having with us.
We can no longer be fully present in the most important conversation because we are distracted by the second, the AI conversation. And this distraction creates a snowballing effect.
First is the impact on others involved in the conversation. Research has shown delays on the order of 700-800 milliseconds have an impact on the person we are engaging. They read something into the delay, perhaps they see it as us not paying attention or a disagreement.
As this repeats in the conversation, their concern increases.
Second is something researchers call “inattentional blindness.” The best way to think of this is to imagine driving a car with a hands-free phone. All of us do this. While the research shows our eyes may be focused on the road, our attention may be on what’s happening on our phone. The same happens in these conversations; while we should be focused on the other person, our attention is drawn to the AI conversation.
A few moments ago, I talked about having two simultaneous conversations. The primary conversation with the person. But now AI creates a competing conversation, drawing our attention from the most important conversation.
And all the other individual sees is our inattention.
For us, it becomes two things competing for our attention in a zero sum game.
Now we play this forward again.
As we become increasingly dependent on AI in the moment, we begin surrendering our own thinking and engagement to AI. Since it is listening and giving us answers, we can be completely disengaged from what’s happening. AI is doing the work for us, we are just mouthing the words.
Even if it’s intelligent, we are no longer participating in the conversation, we are just the voice of the real participant, AI. We are physically present, but the words and the underlying thinking coming out of our mouths aren’t ours.
When we put ourselves into the position of the person we are trying to engage, what’s their experience of the conversation?
As that participant, I’m expecting the person I’m talking to being fully engaged, mirroring my engagement. But they aren’t. It’s clear something else is going on. They are having another conversation with someone or something I don’t know about. I wonder which words are theirs or which are from the uninvited guest. Engagement and trust plummet.
AI, currently, does massive pattern recognition. It’s phenomenal at this. But this strength becomes a weakness in being present in the conversation.
Each conversation happens in the moment, based on the circumstances each person brings into the conversation. They may be relevant to the conversation, or totally irrelevant, “my boss is waiting on this report.” But they impact our conversations.
But AI can’t recognize this because its knowledge is based on thousands and millions of conversations (real and imagined). It can’t know what each person is bringing into the conversation.
Even in the moment AI, increasingly, can recognize intonation, pauses, vocabulary shifts, even facial expressions. It may be better than we are.
But it isn’t living in conversation. Something I say gets a reaction, it impacts that person. And something that person says does something to me. Slight micro expressions, shifts, the emotional engagement of people collaborating and learning. The mutual adaptation, through the discussion. These are what brings life to the conversation.
AI can observe this, but it isn’t inside it.
Human engagement is less about knowing the patterns of past conversations and experience, but the judgment about when the pattern doesn’t apply. Yes, we bring the experience of hundreds of conversations into each discussion, but it’s the judgment at the moment in time; recognizing something is different.
There’s one final area, possibly the most worrisome. Over time, there is the tendency to surrender our thinking to our AI companion. Since it is analyzing the conversation in real time, providing suggestions, the temptation is to stop thinking for ourselves, letting the tool do it for us.
What happens to our capabilities and judgment after 100 conversations we haven’t really been part of? After a year or two, we find people incapable of engaging without the tool. While we are physically present, the words are coming out of our mouths, but they aren’t our words. We become the puppet on AI’s arm.
I’m a tremendous fan of AI tools, they are embedded in virtually everything I do. There is one place they will never be, a participant in the conversation I am having with you.
Afterword: A great AI based discussion of this post. Again, they give some great examples that illustrate the key points in this article. Enjoy!
