There's a version of efficiency that looks really bloody clever on paper but actually costs you everything that actually matters.

You've probably seen it happen in real life. Ever seen a business replace something 'human with something automated? Sure that has maybe saved them a bit of money, you can get a nice bit of praise for it... but nobody counts what walked out the door with the saving.

Rory Sutherland has a version of this that I keep coming back to. The hotel doorman. You replace him with an automatic door and your CFO celebrates how clever you are saving £50k/year...But nobody factors in the loss of that man. The guest he remembered by name, the person he noticed was struggling and helped without being asked or the client feeling of being welcomed rather than just admitted.

That feeling is the brand. As my friend Sean Cornell says, that's the 'joy' of your brand. And you can't measure it.

I think about this a lot in relation to how we work with clients, specifically the Demand Tension Workshop, which is the first thing we do at the start of every engagement.

It's ninety minutes and it's just us and the client. No agenda beyond getting to the truth of what their business is trying to do, who it's trying to reach, and what those people actually need to feel in order to say yes to your business.

Now, I could automate it. There are tools that would let me replace that conversation with a form, a questionnaire, a bot that asks the same questions and compiles the answers into a document. It would save me a load of time and money. On paper it should be an improvement.

But it would be catastrophically worse.

Because the thing that makes the workshop valuable isn't the questions. It's what happens in the gaps between the answers, the moment a client says something and then immediately contradicts it and neither of us notices until ten minutes later when it becomes obvious that the contradiction is actually the point. The tangent that seems irrelevant until it turns out to be the most important thing we talked about. The silence after a question that produces the best answer of the whole entire session.

I ran one of these at the beginning of this week and I am always surprised how the BEST parts of what we do, come from these situations... and you don't get it from a form.

What clients are actually buying

I've closed several clients recently, and when I look back at those conversations, something is very clear. None of them led with the quality of the work we do. They cared about that, but it wasn't what was the 'decider'.

What they actually cared about was the experience of the conversation itself. How it felt to talk through the problem. Whether they felt understood. Whether they trusted that the process would be worth it.

One client is currently halfway through a project with us and she's so happy with how it's going that she's already recommended me to two people.

That's not a portfolio outcome, that's a relationship outcome. And it comes directly from the way we run the process, the care that goes into the workshop, the check-ins, the feeling throughout the engagement that they're being genuinely looked after rather than just serviced.

You can't automate that. Or rather, you can ... but what you'd be automating is a hollow version of it that produces none of the same results.

The cost nobody counts

The AI efficiency argument is seductive because the savings are visible and the losses aren't. You save £X on the process and your spreadsheet shows the saving but nobody counts the client who felt like a number and didn't come back. Nobody counts the referral that never happened because the experience wasn't remarkable enough to talk about. Nobody counts the trust that eroded because the conversation felt like a transaction.

I'm not anti-AI. I use it constantly. It's amazingly useful for a huge range of things, research, drafting, analysis, production tasks that used to take hours and now take minutes.

But there's a category of work where the human conversation is the product. Where the value isn't the output of the session, it's what happens during it. Where the relationship built in the process is inseparable from the result the client came for.

The Demand Tension Workshop is that kind of work. So is any genuine discovery or creative process. So is any creative collaboration that produces something the client couldn't have articulated before you started.

In those moments, efficiency is the enemy. The slow conversation is the point.

The question worth asking

Before you automate something in your business, it's worth asking... what is this actually for?

If it's a process task, scheduling, data entry, first-draft production, automate it without guilt. That's exactly what the tools are for.

But if it's a human moment, a conversation that builds trust, a workshop that uncovers something the client didn't know they needed to say, a touchpoint that makes someone feel genuinely looked after... think carefully about what you're trading away for the saving.

You get a pat on the back for cutting costs. Nobody counts what you lost.