There is an ad agency that adopted AI and lost something essential in the process. The warning inside it applies to every service business, whether you’re using AI or not.
A mid-sized UK advertising agency started losing clients even though every campaign was hitting its performance targets. The CEO found out why during exit interviews. Clients said they felt like they were working with a vending machine, not a creative partner. When they asked account teams to explain why a particular approach was right for their brand, the teams couldn’t answer. They had learned to operate the AI tools. They hadn’t developed creative judgment.
This story comes from a Harvard Business Review piece published this week. The authors identify three ways AI erodes organizational capability. First, people stop developing judgment through experience. The fluency of AI outputs encourages cognitive offloading, and the tacit knowledge that builds through practice quietly disappears. Second, moral decision-making gets buried inside algorithms and the deliberation that once happened in credit committees, promotion reviews, and compliance conversations gets replaced by scores and optimization functions, and accountability becomes invisible. Third, and most relevant to service businesses, the human interactions that build trust get replaced by machine-mediated workflows. Instead of working through problems together — debating options, diagnosing failures, negotiating trade-offs — people increasingly consult personalized tools that deliver private answers. The group stops building shared understanding. Trust thins out, with colleagues and with customers.
This is not an abstract threat. The advertising agency’s account teams didn’t wake up one morning and decide to stop developing judgment. It happened gradually, through a hundred small decisions to let the tool handle it. The efficiency gains were real. The relationship damage was invisible. Until clients started leaving.
The agency’s fix was blunt: no AI-generated content in client-facing presentations. Every account got a designated strategic lead whose job was to challenge AI outputs and advocate for approaches the algorithm would miss. Teams had to create original strategic narratives explaining their thinking. They had to rebuild the muscle they’d let atrophy. The human became the face of the work again and clients noticed.
Now here’s the thing: most of the service business leaders I work with are not heavy AI users. But the pattern of efficiency rising while human connection quietly erodes is not new and it doesn’t require AI to happen. It happens when teams get busy and stop having real conversations with customers. It happens when processes get polished and interactions get scripted. It happens when leaders optimize for throughput and forget that their clients hired them for judgment, not just output. The conclusion of the article makes it clear: your future depends on using whatever tools you have to augment human judgment while fiercely protecting the human input no system can replace.
The businesses I’m watching that are getting this right share one thing in common: they’re deliberate about protecting the interactions that build trust. They use every efficiency gain to free up time for their people to connect more deeply with customers and each other. That’s the right frame. If your team is getting more efficient but less connected, you’re optimizing the wrong things.
Ask yourself: if a client left tomorrow, what would they say in their exit interview? Would they describe working with a partner? Or a vending machine?
Want to go deeper on building that kind of connection?
Jed Meyer and I co-authored Experience Uncommon to document exactly this kind of work. Jed is the CEO of St. Cloud Financial Credit Union, one of the fastest-growing credit unions in Minnesota, and the book tells the story of how his team built a culture around what they call the Meaningful Difference strategy: looking for every opportunity to connect with members, employees, and community in ways that go far beyond the transaction. Over a decade, their team logged more than 3,300 stories of human connection — and the results showed up in growth, retention, and a culture people actually want to be part of.
If you lead a service business and you want your team to be the kind of people clients describe as partners — not vending machines — this book is for you.
Download it free at: Experience Uncommon –
