There’s no shortage of conversation right now about artificial intelligence and what it means for the future of business. Most of it centers on efficiency — what AI can automate, accelerate or replace. That’s a legitimate conversation. But it tends to skip over something equally important: what happens to the businesses that use it to replace the wrong things.
Tom’s take is straightforward. AI is a useful tool as a research resource, a way to enhance knowledge and support the work behind the scenes. What it isn’t — and what most people don’t actually want — is a substitute for human interaction.
What People Actually Want
Think about the last time you called a vendor and ended up in an automated system. Chances are your instinct was to find the fastest way out of it. That experience is common enough that it barely needs explaining — most people will go out of their way to reach a real person, because the interaction they’re looking for isn’t one an AI can replicate.
That instinct isn’t going away. And businesses that treat it as a problem to be engineered around are going to find themselves losing ground to the ones that lean into it.
Where Larger Companies Are Getting It Wrong
There’s a pattern worth paying attention to among larger companies right now. In the push to automate and scale, some have drifted into building systems that serve internal priorities more than client needs — technology that’s complex to maintain, difficult to untangle and, in many cases, delivering an experience that clients didn’t ask for and don’t want.
The short-term logic is understandable. Automation reduces costs and increases throughput. But when clients start to feel like an afterthought — when the relationship is replaced by a portal, a chatbot or a process that no one seems to own — the cost shows up somewhere else. It shows up in attrition, in reputation and in the slow erosion of trust that’s hard to rebuild once it’s gone.
The Competitive Advantage of Staying Human
For small and mid-sized businesses, this is actually an opportunity. The ability to offer real relationships, genuine responsiveness and consistent human contact is something larger organizations are actively moving away from. That creates space for businesses that are willing to do it well.
Tom’s bet is on human-to-human contact — not as a nostalgic preference, but as a strategic position. The firms and businesses that maintain that standard while using technology to support their work rather than replace it are the ones most likely to build something durable.
At Dunn CPA Firm, that’s the model we operate on. The tools we use are in the background. The relationship is in the front.
AI tools are great for research and portals to knowledge, enhancing knowledge.
I think in the professional world, I would not try to substitute AI bots for your interaction with humans and clients and prospects. I don’t think anybody wants that. I know anytime I call a vendor and I run into an AI bot, I hate it. I do everything I can to get out of it. I don’t want to interact with the.
Human.
So I think if they keep that stuff in the background and use it to support their business.
And maintain the human contact, that’s how you’re going to get ahead.
In the future here. As a lot of these bigger companies go down a path where they don’t care about, they don’t care about their clients, they care less about their clients. And they’re actually getting themselves in a lot of trouble and tied up in a lot of knots as they have doing programming that nobody, that’s no good and nobody can figure out and now they have to untangle that mess or they alienate all their customers because they’re providing them with services that nobody wants. They’re forcing them to use services. So it’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out, but I’ll bet on the human to human contact contacts and relationships if you want to get ahead.
