The Human Connection · Clief Notes

The Human Connection

Been thinking of that video that Jake posted with Katie from NLP Logix, and it's been rattling around my head all night that I need to get it out.

One thing kept coming up repeatedly, no matter how much AI you stack into a process, the human is still in the base layer. Not a feature. Not a nice-to-have. The foundation everything else sits on.It's the thing a lot of us skip past when we get excited about what we can build now with our shiny new toys.

Here's the thing. AI lets us move fast. Stupid fast. Stuff that used to take a team and a quarter now takes an afternoon and a decent prompt. Thats real and I'm not gonna pretend otherwise. But speed and technical horsepower were never the point. I've talked about this before, somebody still has to want the thing. Somebody still has to use it, click it, read it, feel something about it. You can smack out the most technically impressive build in the world and if there's no human on the other end who actually needed it, you built a very fast, very expensive nothing.

And I think this is where a lot of companies are gonna get it wrong. They're chasing efficiency and data and optimization like that's the whole game. It's not. It's half the game. The companies that actually make it are the ones that keep a human somewhere in the loop the entire time, not just at the end as a customer who receives the output. In the design. In the decisions about what even gets built. In the tone of the thing when it finally ships.

The world's gotten more connected through the internet and social media than ever before, but it's also gotten a lot more impersonal right alongside it. Despite that level of connection and ability to share, people feel more alone than ever. You call a company, you get a bot. You get a form. You get an email that was clearly written by something that has never had a bad day. There are also the algorithm created para-social relationships crafted to be one sided to replace true human connection, all in order to optimize the all might click/engagement rate.

For one of the reasons why, look at what's happened in education. STEM students are taking fewer humanities classes than they used to. Less philosophy, less rhetoric, less "why do people actually behave the way they do." They're getting surrounded by efficiency and data and optimization from day one, and that's great for building the model, but it's a real gap when it comes to understanding the person who has to use it. They see the people as just another point to increase interaction rates with, but those still are hollow. (There is also the whole economic/MBA side of of it, but that is a different conversation).

So you get two things stacking on top of each other. AI making it easier than ever to build fast, impersonal things. And builders who, through no real fault of their own, confuse the tool for the meal. They know the kitchen inside and out but never got much training in why anyone would want to eat there. Not a great combo if the goal is connection.

But here's the part that gives me hope. People are craving the personal touch again, and you can see it growing right alongside the AI boom, not in spite of it. The more automated everything gets, the more a genuine, human-shaped moment stands out. It's the same reason a handwritten note still hits different even when everyone has email. Scarcity creates value. Personal touch is getting scarce, so it's getting valuable again.

At the end of the day, I think the companies that win the AI era aren't the ones with the most efficient pipeline. They're the ones who used all that speed to buy themselves more room to be human, not less. Use the AI to handle the grunt work so you've got more time to actually think about the person on the other end. Design with them in mind, not just for throughput. Build the output so it feels like it came from someone who gives a [censored], not a system that's optimizing for clicks.

That's the trade nobody talks about enough. The hours AI hands back aren't just extra output capacity, they're a chance to slow back down where it counts. It gives your customers that time back and they can then spend figuring out their own version of the human connection, the thing that actually grows their business. That's where the real power of AI comes through, giving humans more time to do human stuff.

The efficiency-first companies will ship faster for a while. But "faster" isn't a moat anymore, everybody's got the same tools. What's a moat is remembering there's a person on the other side of the screen and to build like that person matters.

Anyway. That's where my head's at this morning.

1 comment

The Human Connection