The Year in Tech, 2024: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

11 AI WITH A HUMAN FACE

by Mike Seymour, Dan Lovallo, Kai Riemer, Alan R. Dennis, and Lingyao (Ivy) Yuan

All companies want to give their customers richer and more engaging experiences. That’s one of the most effective ways to create and sustain competitive advantage. The challenge is to offer those experiences at scale without depersonalizing or commodifying them.

Throwing people at the problem becomes prohibitively expensive very quickly. And even if a company had enough employees to offer individual service at scale, in many situations customers prefer to interact with someone of their own gender, age, or ethnic background—an impossible staffing task. Moreover, research suggests that humans do not always produce the best results for every ...