Anything But Talking To People

As a nerd learning how to do this business thing, here's one skill that's more valuable than any tech stack: Talking to people. Yet somehow I feel a lot of technology was designed specifically so we don't have to.

It started with texting in the late 90s, and then email. No need to pick up the phone to inquire about something. Just fire off an email. As technology marched on, the fellow nerds in Silicon Valley did their best to invent things that let you skip the need for human contact. Need to call a cab? Nah, just tap here and there and an Uber is on its way. And you don't even have to tell the driver where you're going. Same with ordering food. Either straight to your home from the app, or, if for some weird reason you're already out in the real world, you just tap it into the touchscreen at the entrance.

And now, thanks to AI, we can avoid conversations with real humans even in situations where that would be the only thing that made any sense. Like customer research. Making an app for professional dog walkers, but don't want to go out and talk to dog walkers for feedback? Fear not, just use this prompt inside ChatGPT: "You are a professional dog walker giving feedback about an app."

If you're a founder, or thinking of becoming one, please be very careful. Market research and talking to users is messy. It's uncomfortable. It takes guts and energy. It is so tempting to ease all that struggle and just spin up a neat AI persona. Only, the struggle is the point. You need to read straight off a real person's face what their reaction is to your idea, then dig into what triggered it. And if your idea is truly novel, it stands to reason that nothing has been written about online for the AI to ingest, and, therefore, anything it pretends a real person would say or think about it is nothing more than a guess.

AI can do a lot, and it'll only get better, but it can't replace a real, deep, raw conversation with another human.