The Hard Part about adopting new digital tools and AI is almost never the technology, it's changing the way people work. This newsletter is for you if you're a leader struggling with where to start OR if some initiatives are running and you're wondering where the ROI is going to come from. Never more than a 5 minute read. Weekly.
When Every Customer Has an AI Agent: The Coming Complaints Apocalypse
|
Dear Reader, "Where am I getting screwed?" that's the question entrepreneur Mark Cuban asks his large language model. I heard him say it in conversation with Allie Miller on a webinar this week. And it's the question behind one thing that really excites me from a consumer perspective about the potential of agentic AI: as a tool to combat the bureaucracy of every day life. No more negotiating labyrinth-like complaints processes, no more attempting to cancel Amazon Prime that you never really intended to sign up for, going through 50 screens. Your AI agent combats the forces of injustice on your behalf. Are businesses going be ready for this AI apocalypse of complaints of customers raising issues that they've always been able to raise but it just wasn't worth their while? Do small businesses start taking large businesses to the Small Claims Court for unpaid invoices because all they need to do is set their relentless agent on it? Is there going to be a modern-day vigilante that goes around reporting potholes to the local council? Snap a photo and the metadata and all the info and geolocation are just routed straight there. It's not a system that the council has put in place. It's agentic, it's citizen-led. Do applicants start to be able to fight back against the applicant tracking system that auto-rejects their application? Effort used to be a key distinguisher between poor candidates and good candidates but when the bar for quality is raised, do the methods for evaluation need to evolve? And it's not just Mark Cuban. Even in areas as sensitive as finance, the FCA's Mills Review found that 1 in 5 UK adults were "open to AI making decisions for them" and 26% were already trusting the likes of Claude and ChatGPT to give them financial advice. One of my favourite business books of the last few years has been The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder by Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao. Apparently, the working title of the book was "The Sh*t-fixers." So, the question for the week, where do you think AI can be a sh*tfixer for you? I'm going to start with the 99p I've been paying Apple for at least 10 years for storage that I don't even know if I'm using. Let me know what you'd fix with your relentless consumer champion agent that never sleeps. I really want to know and will share the best ones. And I always reply to replies. Until next time, Helen P.S. And if you're reading this less as a consumer and more as a leader in a consumer facing organisation who those relentless AI agents will be pointed at, three minutes will tell you the trap you're currently sitting in and the best first move out. https://ai-trap.helen-dawson.com/ |
The Hard Part Newsletter
The Hard Part about adopting new digital tools and AI is almost never the technology, it's changing the way people work. This newsletter is for you if you're a leader struggling with where to start OR if some initiatives are running and you're wondering where the ROI is going to come from. Never more than a 5 minute read. Weekly.
Dear Reader, To quote the comedian, Vic Reeves: 88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot. In so many conversations that I have with leaders, they want numbers to give them confidence that they are on the right path with AI. Yet, CFOs operate on the basis that words talk, numbers scream. But is there any good data or is it all Lies, Damn Lies and AI Statistics, to paraphrase Disraeli (who was probably quoting someone else). How does this show up? Every month, reports claim "mind-blowing"...
I have a half-finished novel, a Creative Writing degree and have therefore read a lot about writing. This is known as procrasti-learning. So, borrowing from George Orwell's essay "Why I Write", I thought I'd chip in on the AI writing debate. Hence, my punny title. This comes in the week where Anthropic announced that they are "watermarking" the text that Claude generates. This is their response to the transparency requirements in the EU AI Act. Essentially, the watermark is using a non-random...
Dear Reader, I already feel smug as I write this, as the pizza dough for our dinner is proving in the kitchen. And the thing about this pizza dough is that it seems wrong at every single stage. Or if I'm being melodramatic. Every. Single. Stage. And if I'd been making it solo for the first time, maybe it might have taken a one-way trip to the bin, rather than ending up in the oven. *Trigger warning* I'm going to speak fondly about the COVID lockdown years. Yes, I know that on so many levels...