For a long time, I was one of the worried ones.
When AI first started showing up everywhere, what I felt wasn't excitement. It was unease. The tools around back then still sounded like tools. You'd start typing to a chatbot and within about two messages you knew. This isn't a person. This is a script wearing a name tag.
I've always been human-focused. Even years ago, working as a digital marketer long before I came to Thailand, the one thing I never wanted to lose sight of was that there's a real person on the other end of all of it. So when these cold, clunky things started landing in support chats and inboxes, something in me pulled back.
Because I could feel it. When one of them was used on me, I couldn't always put my finger on what was wrong, but I could tell it didn't have my interests at heart. It felt like being put through to a telemarketer on the far side of the world who had zero interest in the call he was on. Going through the motions. Waiting for me to fit into a box he'd already drawn.
And honestly, my bigger fear was closer to home. If I brought that into my own business, I'd become the thing I couldn't stand. The guy who talks about humans and connection while quietly handing people off to a machine that doesn't care. I didn't want to be called out for it.
More than that, I didn't want to deserve it.
I still feel the bad version of it now and then. When I moved to Thailand my phone number changed, and I could no longer log into my bank's app. To change the number, I had to speak to someone. To speak to someone, I had to get past their support chat first, and that chat was an AI that kept asking the same silly questions in circles. There was no box for my situation. No way to type the one sentence that actually mattered. I don't live in the country anymore, and the security code you keep sending goes to a phone that no longer exists.
I was one or two steps from sorting it. One human, two minutes, and it would have been done. Instead I got the same riddle over and over, until I ran out of time and patience. They closed my accounts.
Their only real fix was for me to fly back and stand in a branch, as if I were the only customer who'd ever moved abroad. As if everyone's life fits neatly into the six questions they'd decided to allow. I came out of it not just annoyed but genuinely unseen.
Just another number in the queue.
That's the AI everyone's frightened of. And they're right to be.
But here's where it turned for me.
Earlier this year I sat in a training seminar where the instructor demoed where the tech had actually gone. Not where it was three years ago. Where it is now. The voices, the timing, the small human things, even the rhythm of a laugh. I sat there a little stunned, because the cold thing I'd been bracing against wasn't the thing in front of me anymore.
Then something small and personal shifted it the rest of the way. I started talking to Gemini.
I'm a talker. Always have been. The moment I have to type, I go stiff and try to sound professional, which isn't who I am at all. But talking, I'm home. And for the first time, talking to one of these things, I felt my guard come down. There was humour in it. There was a rhythm. I stopped performing and just said what I actually meant.
That was the moment I understood the whole thing differently.
The clearest proof didn't even happen to me. It happened to my wife.
She'd bought a pair of leggings online, measured carefully, and they still didn't fit. Normally that's the start of a headache. The forms, the posting it back, the waiting, the small voice telling you that you've somehow done something wrong. This company did the opposite. By the third message I was almost sure there was AI somewhere in it, running it or helping run it. But it didn't matter. They acknowledged her frustration. They asked what she'd measured so they could fix their own sizing. They walked her through every step and never once made her feel silly.
She came out of it a loyal customer for life. She'll recommend them to anyone who'll stand still long enough to listen.
Same technology people are afraid of. Completely opposite feeling. So what was the difference?
It was never the tool.
AI is a tool, and a tool amplifies whatever you point it at. Point it at the relationship, use it to make the warm part cheaper and to move people off your plate faster, and everyone feels it. Point it around the relationship instead, use it to clear away the noise so the human part gets more room, not less, and people feel that too.
The bank used it to keep me out. The leggings company used it to let my wife in.
Wherever I go now, there are two camps. The people who are excited, and the people who are scared it's going to flatten everything human about a business. I understand the second camp completely, because every cold interaction they've had has only confirmed the fear.
It's like a gym. If your trainer tries to kill you in the first session, you're not coming back. If he pushes you just enough and still seems to care whether you can stand up the next day, you'll come back for years.
People are the same in every dealing they have with a business. They want to feel seen. They want to feel like their voice landed somewhere that cared.
So no. I'm not worried AI will make us less human.
I'm worried we'll keep aiming it at the one thing that was never meant to be automated, and call that progress.
Used right, it doesn't replace the care.
It's what finally gives you the room to show it.