Automation is eating jobs. That’s not a hot take. That’s just math. Every year, more of the transaction gets handled by a screen, a bot, or an algorithm. Scheduling, payments, even customer service scripts. All of it is getting automated out of existence.
Here’s the part almost nobody talks about. That’s the best thing that could happen to you.
I recently got into John DiJulius’s book The Relationship Economy, and Chapter 2 hit me like a bucket of cold water. His point is simple, but it rewired how I think about my own business. As machines get better at the transaction, humans get more starved for the connection. And starvation creates value.
When was the last time a business made you feel like an actual person, not a ticket number?
We Didn’t Get Less Social. We Got Less Skilled.
Think about the last ten customer interactions you had. How many of them involved a human being who made you feel like more than a name in a system?
We’ve built a world optimized for speed and convenience. In the process, we quietly let the muscle of “making someone feel good on the other end of a conversation” go soft. Not because people got worse. Because they stopped practicing.
That’s the opportunity, if you’re paying attention. When rapport becomes rare, rapport becomes valuable. Scarcity drives price in every market I’ve ever operated in, and that includes the market for how people feel about doing business with you.
So let me ask you this. When’s the last time you personally made a customer, an employee, or even a stranger feel truly seen?
Why This Hit Home For Me
When I started Window Ninjas, I was the business. One guy, a squeegee, and a truck. Every customer got me. My voice on the phone, my face at the door, my “thank you” at the end of the job. There was no system standing between me and the person I was serving.
Then I scaled. Ten locations later, I’m not the guy showing up to every job anymore. And here’s what I’ve learned the hard way. Systems can schedule the appointment, dispatch the tech, and send the invoice. Systems cannot make a customer feel like they mattered. That still has to be built, trained, and protected on purpose, at every single location, by every single person who touches that customer.
I’ll ask you the question I had to ask myself. As your business grows, are you scaling the connection, or are you accidentally automating it away?
The businesses that lose in the next decade won’t be the ones that automated too much. They’ll be the ones that automated the parts that were supposed to stay human.
What This Means If You’re Building Something Right Now
If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur reading this and wondering where you fit in a world of AI and automation, here’s your answer. Don’t compete with the machine on speed. You’ll lose. Compete with it on connection. You’ll win every time, because the machine can’t do it at all.
Concretely, that looks like this.
- Answer the phone like a human, not a menu. If a robot could have handled that call exactly the same way you did, you just told your customer they weren’t worth a real person’s time.
- Remember things nobody asked you to remember.A name, a dog, a reason they called last time. That’s not CRM data. That’s a relationship.
- Train your team to connect, not just to execute. A perfectly completed job with zero human warmth is a commodity. Commodities get shopped on price.
Which one of those are you actually doing right now, and which one have you let slide?
The Bottom Line
Automation isn’t the threat to your business or your career. Indifference is. The tools replacing jobs are only replacing the parts of those jobs that never required a human in the first place. Everything else, the part where someone feels seen, heard, and cared about, just went from “nice to have” to the single most defensible competitive advantage left.
The world doesn’t need more people who can process a transaction fast. It needs more people who can make a stranger feel like they matter. That skill isn’t being automated. It’s being made scarce, and scarce is exactly where you want to be standing.
So here’s my real question for you. In a world going faster and more automated by the day, are you becoming more human, or less?
If you want to go deeper on this, pick up John DiJulius’s book The Relationship Economy. Chapter 2 alone is worth the read.
