Rory Sutherland

By the way, I'm absolutely fanatical about call centers because I'm terrified that in an AI age, people will try and effectively automate them.

I think what you should do instead is make them slightly smaller but a lot better.

because I don't think you can substitute for the human in cases of unusual problems, special circumstances, empathy, generally.

Don't get me wrong, I think you can get AI empathy.

I'm not suggesting that AI is going to be completely unempathic.

But at some point, it's rather like the equivalent of I want to speak to the manager.

There will be situations where you want to speak to a person who can understand your specific situation and has the power to intervene to override the normal...

rules and regulations to solve your problem because it is commonsensical to do so.

Even if, you know, our service level agreement doesn't normally allow us to send out a replacement part.

In this case, since your part is faulty... Somebody who has the power to do the right thing.

Got it exactly.

And I think, you know, I think that will ultimately you'll have to have the human as the last port of call on that.

Also, your call center is the only way you can find out the problems that people can't solve anywhere else.

Do you see what I mean?

So there was a very smart person I met at Microsoft who, when they took over some fairly niche Microsoft product, they put the call center in the middle of the development team.

I mean, I would argue that the call center of British Airways should be on the same floor as the boardroom because it's where you find out where you're going wrong with your existing customers who are the most important people.

But I want to go back to... You said, by the way, exactly the same thing Dan Davis did, which is one huge advantage of being a customer value company, not a shareholder value company, is...

is that customers live in the real world, and therefore you are actually rooted in reality, whereas shareholders, by the way, not shareholders, but the shareholders are principally interested in justifying their own existence to their investors, and therefore they're dealing with a highly artificial construct in terms of defining the value of a customer.

The shareholder value movement is totally incoherent because over what time frame, which shareholder, what are you optimizing for?

It's completely incoherent nonsense, which is very, very friendly to stock market analysts who want a ready supply of quarterly data so they can bullshit their way out of things.