Proximity to Reality: Unfair Advantages in an Artificial World
Thoughts On AI, Customer Feedback Loops, and Leverage
Yelling “Representative!” doesn’t work as well as it used to.
Recently, I had to contact a vendor to get support for a billing issue. It started with a string of red flags. First, I had to perform a deep Google search just to figure out how to reach support. The option was intentionally hidden, completely absent from an obvious place on their website or inside their application. Then, to open a ticket, I was forced into a rigid contact form that required me to choose from highly limited dropdown menus. There was no “other” bucket, forcing me to waste time arbitrarily forcing my issue into a category where it didn’t belong. Then the form demanded administrative time. Along with an account number, it featured a mandatory question I have never seen on a customer service form in my life: “What date did you become a customer?”
I have been a client of this business for years. Whoever built this workflow clearly didn’t want people to contact them. The final straw, the one that nearly made me crash out, came right after I spent all that time filling out the information and hit submit. A message popped up to let me know they would get back to me in 7 to 10 business days.
IKYFL.
Your High-Leverage is Proximity to Reality
This was annoying as a customer (understatement). As a business leader, I understand why more companies are applying AI and automation to streamline customer service operations and improve margins.
The problem starts when companies treat human interaction as overhead instead of intelligence. Fewer support tickets may look like efficiency, but it can also mean higher frustration and less visibility into customers who are forced to resolve issues through search engines, Reddit, peer networks, or even competitors.
Most entrepreneur or leaders of smaller, growing, or resource-constrained organizations cannot operate by the rules of these massive too-big-to-fail corporations. Nor should you want to. You have an unfair advantage that they are gleefully automating away: proximity to reality.
Distance is the vulnerability of scale. In a world that treats human interaction as friction, your unfair advantage is unfiltered proximity to reality.
In systems thinking, feedback loops dictate whether your organization is operating in a virtuous cycle of customer delight or a vicious cycle of hidden resentment. Automation should optimize your ability to understand how to better serve your customers, not shield you and your team from reality.
In practice, creating a virtuous customer feedback loop:
I’ve been thinking about how entrepreneurs can leverage emerging tools to improve operations without becoming the kind of company that treats customers like a necessary inconvenience.
Your most overlooked growth strategy may be making customers feel like they matter, whether they are dealing with a human or an artificial agent.
Here are four questions to consider.
When should a customer be able to talk to a human?
This is both a philosophical question and an operational one. Not every issue needs a human response, but some do. The question is whether you have clearly defined when a human needs to be involved, and whether the path to that person is always visible or intentionally blocked.How are you discovering what customers actually need?
Let customers describe their pain points in their own words instead of forcing them through canned workflows with your assumptions baked in. The words they use, and the workarounds they create can tell you a lot about their values and pain points.How are customer touch points resulting in customer intelligence?
Support requests, complaints, onboarding questions, churn reasons, sales objections, and repeated “simple” questions are not noise. They are opportunities to learn how to serve your audience, improve your offering, and decide where to best focus your finite resources.How do you know whether you are actually meeting customer needs?
It is not a great long-term sign if customers are ultimately seeking answers to questions you should answer on Reddit, in private forums, through peer networks, or even from a competitor. Your tools should reveal where customers are getting stuck, whether you were able to resolve their issues, and where your current systems are falling short.
Too many companies completely fail all four of these leading practices. The definitive mark of a company that simply doesn’t give a damn is one that offers no path past the machine, publishes generic answers to questions no one is asking, and never bothers to ask whether your problem was solved.
Your leverage is not in the tools you use, but in how you use them to be better to the humans you serve.
I wrote more about this on my website in “AI, Feedback Loops, and Proximity as Leverage”, where I also share four questions every company should ask before putting AI between itself and its customers.
Highest Leverage is Handcrafted for Entrepreneurs
I’m Kishau (pronounced Kih-shaw). I’m a computer scientist and systems thinker, and I’ve been a full-time entrepreneur for more than two decades. Throughout my career, I’ve led teams to deploy enterprise tech for hundreds of organizations, navigating everything from bootstrapping and grants to raising millions in venture capital. I partner with entrepreneurs to explore non-obvious moves, overlooked resources, and unconventional strategies for moving their ideas forward. Here, you’ll find raw snippets from my work notes, cautionary tales, and new inspiration for everyday people executing big ideas. Thanks for reading!