The Human Advantage in a World Obsessed with AI
I’ve read the summaries. I’ve seen the dashboards. But none of them replaced one good conversation.
Over the last few months, I’ve been having the same conversation over and over again.
Companies are racing to embed AI into everything: their product, their operations, their GTM motion.
And on the surface, it makes sense. AI is fast. AI is scalable. AI is efficient.
But there’s a dangerous side effect that I haven’t heard many talk about:
AI is quietly pushing humans further away from other humans.
And that includes your customer.
The more we automate, the easier it becomes to forget the most important part of any business:
The person on the other side of the screen.
In this post, I want to walk you through:
Why customer closeness is more important than ever in an AI-driven world
How some companies are getting this horribly wrong
What the best teams are doing to stay connected and win
AI is creating distance between companies and customers
Let’s look at what’s happening right now.
Support? Automated.
Sales discovery? Replaced by forms.
CS? Underfunded or over-automated.
Product feedback? Filtered through dashboards instead of conversations.
In theory, this should make things smoother. More efficient. More data-driven.
But in practice?
It’s creating a massive empathy gap.
AI can summarize call transcripts.
It can detect sentiment.
It can cluster feedback into tidy themes.
But it can’t replace the depth of a real conversation.
It can’t feel the tension in someone’s voice when they say, “Everything’s fine.”
It can’t hear the five-second pause before the truth finally comes out.
Disconnected teams build disconnected products
Here’s what happens when you stop talking to your customers:
You guess.
You guess what they want.
You guess how they define value.
You guess what success looks like.
And the thing about AI? It will help you guess faster. And with more confidence.
But confidence does not equal clarity.
Speed does not equal truth.
Not too long ago, I worked with a mid-sized SaaS company. On paper, things looked great. Usage was steady. Survey scores were fine. Leadership was confident.
But CS started picking up subtle comments. Slight hesitations. Small usability pain points. Nothing alarming, but something felt off.
Then in one quarter, three of their top five customers didn’t renew. Quiet exits. No escalations. Just gone.
They all signed with the same competitor.
Turns out, that competitor had been talking to them. Listening. Co-creating.
Total impact: $2M+ in lost ARR.
And nobody saw it coming because nobody had been on a live call with a real customer in over six months.
The things that should never go away
Let’s be clear. I’m not anti-AI.
I’m pro-customer.
And there are a few practices that must remain non-negotiable, no matter how advanced our tooling gets.
Here’s what should never go away:
1. 1:1 live conversations with customers
Yes, AI can help you synthesize feedback.
Yes, AI can highlight patterns and outliers.
But if you’re not actually talking to your customers live, you are missing everything that matters.
The tone. The hesitations. The “by the way…” comments that don’t show up in surveys.
And there’s something else live conversations allow: the chance to go off-script.
You can ask the real questions. The ones that don’t fit neatly into a form field.
“When you started using our product, you told us [X] was your top priority. Has anything shifted?”
“What’s one thing you’ve been hesitant to share with us?”
“Is there anything about your workflow that’s changed in the last 90 days that we might be missing?”
You know, the questions that no one wants to put in writing. These aren’t questions most people will answer in a feedback form. They require trust. They require space. And often, they require a relationship that already exists. People need to feel safe before they’ll open up. That only happens when you’re present, listening, and engaged.
2. Smarter surveys ≠ less human input
Surveys are still valuable. NPS, CSAT, in-app prompts will all give you signal.
But they often don’t give you the whole story.
Too many teams collect feedback, analyze the data, and assume the work is done.
But raw data does not equal customer insight.
You still need people. You need humans who know your customers, your product, and your strategy to interpret what matters. AI can talk about what your product does. Only a human can make it feel worth buying and worth coming back to.
Here’s where AI helps:
Drafting better, more dynamic surveys based on past behavior
Flagging contradictions or gaps in responses
Grouping qualitative feedback into themes
Predicting likely churn signals early
But here’s what AI cannot do:
Understand political dynamics inside your customer’s org
Sense urgency or apathy beneath polite answers
Ask, “Can you say more about that?” at exactly the right moment
A smarter survey is a starting point. Not the insight itself.
And too many companies are over-indexing on what’s measurable instead of what’s meaningful.
Surveys should inform your conversations and not replace them.
3. In-person visits still matter
You can’t visit every customer. Of course not.
But your most strategic customers are the ones influencing your roadmap, co-building with you, and shaping your brand. They deserve face time.
Because relationships still matter.
Because trust is built in person.
And because nuance often dies on Zoom.
There’s a psychological reason for this too.
In-person communication leads to greater empathy, stronger memory retention, and deeper social connection. Research has shown that up to 55% of communication is nonverbal. That means things like body language, tone, and micro-expressions all matter. You lose most of that through a screen.
But there’s another reason in-person matters, and it’s the one most people miss:
You learn things you’re not supposed to learn.
Not through spying. Through being present.
You might hear that the VP just left.
Or that the new CPO came from a competitor and is itching to bring in their old tech stack.
Or that there’s a quiet budget freeze about to hit, and renewal will be… “tricky.”
These details don’t show up in QBR decks.
They don’t get entered into Salesforce.
They surface over lunch, during a hallway chat, or in a quiet moment at the end of a meeting.
And those details?
They’re the ones that let you stay one step ahead instead of getting blindsided.
The best companies still show up. Not just to sell, but to listen.
To build real relationships.
And to learn what can’t be captured in a form.
Customer Success isn’t going away. It’s growing up.
There’s a lot of noise right now:
“AI will replace CS.”
“Self-serve will make Success teams obsolete.”
“CS is a cost center.”
I don’t agree.
Has CS been in an identity crisis? Sure.
But in this next chapter, CS has the chance to grow up and take the lead.
CS teams are in the best position to:
Champion the customer inside the company
Use AI to proactively manage risk and value
Bridge the gap between what’s being built and what’s being used
The future of CS isn’t reactive. It’s strategic.
And AI is going to help the best CSMs scale their impact and not erase it.
AI is a tool. Customer closeness is a strategy.
This is where I think the market is heading:
AI to handle the repetitive
Humans to handle the relational
And companies that balance both will win
Talk to your customers.
Visit your customers.
Build with your customers.
Remind your cross-functional peers how important it is that they talk to customers too.
Everything else is noise.
Companies should track how they’re progressing in these areas. That means tracking not just one-off initiatives, but long-term behaviors.
Measure it.
Review it over time.
Ask: Are we getting closer to our customers or further away?
And if you’re a CS leader, take this personally.
What are you doing to make sure your team is still the voice of the customer inside the business?
Are you equipping them to use AI to complement their work and not replace it?
Because in a world full of automation, championing the customer is a differentiator.
And that role has never mattered more.
Letting AI drive everything in CS without human connection is like setting your GPS, closing your eyes, and hoping for the best.
The tool is helpful. But you still need to see the road.
So the real question is, how close do you want to be to the people you’re building for?