I get this question on almost every first call now, usually from an owner who is a little embarrassed to ask it. Do not be. It is the right question.
Do customers actually care if a business uses AI?
They care about three things, and none of them is the technology. They care whether they got helped, whether they got helped fast, and whether anybody lied to them along the way. A customer who gets their answer in two minutes does not go home and wonder whether a computer was involved. A customer who spends twenty minutes typing at a chatbot that cannot do anything goes home and tells everybody.
So the honest answer is that people hate bad service. AI is just a new way to deliver bad service at scale, and also a new way to deliver good service at scale. Which one you get depends on how you set it up.
What makes people hate it?
Three things, and I see them over and over.
- Getting trapped. A bot that stands between the customer and a human, with no way out. If there is no "talk to a person" option within two clicks, you have built a wall, not a helper.
- Getting tricked. A bot pretending to be a person, or AI-written emails with a real employee's name on them that the employee never saw. People find out. They always find out.
- Getting the brush-off. Automated replies that sound like a lawyer wrote them, that acknowledge nothing and solve nothing. People can smell it.
None of those are AI problems. They are decisions somebody made about how to use it.
What does responsible use actually look like?
I describe it as putting a robot suit on your employee, not replacing the employee with a robot. The person is still in there, still making the calls, still answering the phone. The suit makes them faster and stronger.
In practice that looks like:
- Your customer service person has a tool that drafts the reply, pulls up the order, and finds the policy. They read it, fix it, and hit send. The customer talks to a person who is suddenly very fast.
- Your bookkeeper has a tool that keys in the invoices. They check the batch and approve it. Four hours of typing becomes twenty minutes of checking.
- Your warehouse gets a tool that spots the orders that are about to be cancelled before they ship. A human decides what to do with them.
In every one of those the person is still there, and now they have time for the parts of the job that actually need a person.
Should I tell customers I am using AI?
Tell them where it matters, and never pretend otherwise. If a bot is answering the chat, say so, and give them a way to a person. If AI drafted the email and a person reviewed it, you do not need a disclaimer any more than you need one for spellcheck. The line is simple: never let a customer believe they are talking to a human when they are not.
The businesses that get in trouble are not the ones that use AI. They are the ones that hide it.
What about my employees? Will they hate it?
Only if they think it is there to replace them. If the first thing your team hears about AI is a memo, yes, they will hate it. If the first thing they experience is a day in a room where they point at the parts of their job they cannot stand and watch those parts get smaller, most of them get on board fast.
That is why I run the workshop on paper, in a room, with the people who do the work. They rank the ideas. They pick what goes first. Nobody is automated at. They are handed the suit.
What is the one rule?
If you would be embarrassed to explain to a customer or an employee exactly how you are using it, do not use it that way. Everything else is detail.
Answered by Jared Lukes, Minneapolis. Twenty-five years in brand, UX, and technology, currently holding fractional AI and technology seats at three companies. About Jared.