Unless you have been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you will have seen AI everywhere. The news, websites, apps, the list goes on.
The AI wave is an interesting one, because it follows the shape of the technology wave before it. When the internet arrived it rapidly wired itself into every business process, and efficiency jumped. AI is now doing the same thing to every existing technology, and the gains are compounding. There is one key difference though. Technology made things better and easier, and if anything it created more jobs for humans. AI is different. It goes straight for what our roles actually are, and for job safety with them. This piece is what I think happens to humans as AI becomes more intertwined with day to day operations.
First things first, what does AI do? AI is the closest thing we have to storing a human brain inside a computer and rattling questions at it. This brain has been trained on more information than any person could read in a thousand lifetimes, but it has its limits: context size, and the absurd amount of energy it takes to run compared to the Darwinian-processed brain you got for free. You ask it a question and it gives you the most likely answer based on everything it was trained on. It feels human. Under the hood it is just numbers. There are a thousand rabbit holes to go down here and I am deliberately staying at the surface.
So where is AI actually being used? My experience is in the crossover between technology and construction, also known as ConTech. It is an interesting industry: companies running on thin margins with astounding amounts of manual data entry and general admin. Reading emails and typing them into CRM systems. Chasing paperwork. Sitting all day clicking buttons. There are thousands of AI tools being built for this, each targeting a different slice, and in my opinion this is exactly what AI is for. The delegated tasks, where a human sits for hours doing something an AI agent could do through an API in seconds.
Which raises the obvious question: what should the humans do instead? I think the answer is the human bits. Answering the phone. Holding the relationship. I do not know many people who enjoy calling a company and being met with a robotic voice instead of a person. It does not understand you the way a human would. It is just there to collect a few details from you, and then it hangs up.
I recently watched a video of Rory Sutherland telling a story about exactly this. The owner of a luxury hotel in London wanted to improve his margins, so he went looking for headcount to cut. His eye landed on the doormen. They stand at the front door all day, being paid well to open it. Fit automatic doors, let the doormen go, save a hundred grand a year. Easy. Then revenue started dropping, and nobody could work out why. After some proper digging, the owner found out what the doormen actually did. They carried luggage. They hailed taxis. They kept vagrants away from the entrance. They recognised repeat guests and greeted them by name. They were the first contact anyone had with the hotel, the front cover of the book, and a good part of its reputation stood on them. He hired them back and issued an apology.
That is the mistake in its purest form: defining a human role by its most basic, visible function, then automating that function away to save costs, while completely ignoring the value the person provides that never shows up on a spreadsheet. The doorman was never really there to open the door.
The same thing is sitting inside every admin role people are itching to automate. An admin on the phone with a tenant can actually relate to them, from their own human experience. They can hear something in the tenant’s voice and go off on the tangent, build the common ground, have the part of the conversation that was never on the script. Drift off script with an AI and it will politely instruct you to get back on topic.
But there is something important underneath that: generations. Most people phoning a trade or service company today are homeowners, mostly above 25, and a good chunk of them grew up without this technology. They are still adapting to it, and some of them hold a genuine vendetta against it. When they call and a robot answers, they are angry. When a younger person calls, someone who grew up surrounded by technology, they do not really mind. It is the McDonald's kiosk all over again. There used to be one or two staff taking orders, human to human. Now you walk up to a screen, tap your order and collect your food. You do not see young people refusing the machine. The only people I have ever seen refuse it and ask for a person are older. Nothing wrong with either.
So does AI just have to wait it out? I think yes, mostly. The friction is generational, and generational friction only ever resolves in one direction. The kiosk did not win an argument, it just waited. In twenty years the homeowner phoning about their boiler will be someone who grew up talking to ChatGPT, and the robot voice will not offend them. They will just be annoyed if it is slow.
But wait it out is only half an answer, because the question was never really about phone lines. What happens to humans? Here is my honest take. AI eats the part of the job that nobody will miss: the re-keying, the chasing, the copying of numbers from one system into another. What is left over is the part that was always the actual job. Judgment. Relationships. Accountability. Somebody still has to decide what is worth doing. Somebody still has to own the mistake. Somebody still has to pick up the phone when it genuinely matters, and mean it.
The companies that get this right will not use AI to have fewer human conversations. They will use it to have more of them, because the hours that used to go into admin get handed back. The ones that get it wrong will fit the automatic doors, let go of the person who used to answer, and wonder why their customers quietly leave.
So here is my prediction. In the future, the companies that do best will be the ones that boast about having humans on their phones. It will become a selling point, the way free returns or next day delivery once were. And the best companies will split it cleanly: humans for the external, customer and client facing admin, and AI for the internal admin.
Think about the amount of times you have spent ages just trying to find a phone number for the helpline of some massive company. You finally dig it out, press 3 on the keypad, then 2, sit through two queues of three minutes each, and your reward at the end of it all is a robot. People will genuinely respect a company that gets them on the phone with a human, fast. Respect like that is rare enough to be worth money.
So in a world full of AI, what happens to humans? We get handed back the human parts of our own jobs. Whether we actually take them, that is the interesting bit, and I do not think the robots get a say in it.