Creatively Solving Human Problems. Because AI Can’t….

Fred Reggie shared this article with me yesterday as an exclamation point on a great conversation we had about the importance of the human touch in customer relationships. AI can fetch a list, or aggregate content from across knowledge domains but it cannot think, create, or feel – these skills remain the exclusive domain of humans.

It made me think of a little story I like to tell about domain names. I had a client many years ago whose domain name was concretereflections.com. They were a father-son team who refinished concrete floors and their work was absolutely stunning. They had just launched the company and were working with me to build a web presence and to raise brand awareness.

I was excited about their product and about helping them get traction but I had some real concerns about their domain name. My immediate reaction was that there were too many e-s and r-s and that it would result in a people tripping over the e-s and r-s and mistyping the name in the browser bar, then hitting a 404 page instead of the website. The customer would likely never realize that they had made a typing mistake and just assume that the site was broken. As we all know, you can lose a customer just that quickly – you never get a second chance to make a good first impression.

I called the son and told him I had an idea that would not only get rid of the potential for typing misfires with their current domain name, but give them an opportunity to convey how fantastic their product was every time they mentioned the website. That idea was to buy the domain YesItsConcrete.com and use it instead of concretereflections.com. The son was all in but Dad was a little skeptical. Dad thought I was a little nutty for suggesting they use a domain name that was not the name of their company but I persisted because I KNEW it was marketing gold.

Son convinced Dad to let me run with it and it was, in fact, MARKETING GOLD. It was easy to say, easy to spell, and conveyed the benefit of the product before the website even opened. They have not been my client for many years now but I check from time to time and they are still making hay with the YesItsConcrete domain to this very day.

I think about this story a lot when I see all the hype about how AI is coming for my job. I don’t believe it. AI might be able to write some code or bring me back a list of concerns people have about refinishing concrete that I can use as fodder to create blog posts, but is AI going to realize that the domain name itself is a problem from the human POV and come up with a creative solution? No it is not. Coming up with a creative solution to a problem that the owners did not even realized existed and that ended up being a win on all levels is the human touch that no AI can replicate because it can’t think, feel, or create. As we move into the AI age, it is our humanity that matters more than ever.

https://lnkd.in/ehfQsacZ