“We’re wasting time, hollowing out our own skills, and pretending it’s innovation.”
On Reddit, a commenter called the AI movement “a gambling addiction disguised as productivity.”
And honestly? I guess he’s kinda right.
Every store plugging AI into every process looks faster on the surface, but a little emptier underneath. You automate your descriptions, pricing, maybe even support, and for a while, it feels like we’ve cracked the system.
But think about it! Have you really?
Underneath that convenience, something starts to feel amiss. The feedback that sharpened your tone. The late-night brainstorms that turned out into your best campaigns. The back-and-forth with customers that really gave your brand its personality.
Because when you use AI just to be efficient, you don’t just lose control over your marketing copy. You lose control over what it feels like to buy from you. And to be fair, AI creates great drafts, summaries, and grunt work. And obviously it can speed up the boring parts of our work.
But the stuff that sticks, the lines people remember, those don’t come from prompts. They come from people. Remember Budweiser’s “Whaaaassup?!” ad? That wasn’t some data-backed genius move. It was a bunch of friends joking around, and someone had the sense to see culture in it.
Or Dollar Shave Club’s first video that wasn’t written by a copywriter optimizing conversions. It was a founder venting about overpriced razors, doing it with enough attitude to make people laugh and buy. There is a comment under that YouTube video saying, “This is how you get people to not click Skip Ad”. Couldn’t agree more.
Most of us hit “Skip Ad” the second we sense it’s AI-generated. It looks polished, sure, but it’s missing the pulse, especially those hollow, soulless AI videos.
Even Big Ass Fans the name literally came from a customer saying, “You make those big-ass fans, right?” after customers repeatedly called referring to the products as "those big-ass fans"
That moment of unfiltered honesty became their identity. No algorithm could’ve written that. Only someone listening could. Because that’s what real marketing is- paying attention to what people actually say when they think no one’s recording it.
It‘s what Harvard Business Review calls “workslop”, polished-looking output that adds nothing of substance, created by teams chasing speed over that connection. They found that AI adoption at work has doubled since 2023, yet 95% of companies have seen no measurable return.
Wait!! If almost everyone’s using AI more, but almost no one’s seeing progress, what are we really scaling?
Seems like all this speed isn’t taking us forward, just making us busier. Because if 95% of companies are seeing no return, maybe it’s time to ask: are we part of that 95% too?
40% of employees say they now receive AI-generated work that takes more time to fix than it would’ve taken to create properly. It’s the same story playing out in e-commerce. The same “efficiency” that promised to save time is also effecting brand trust, clarity, and most importantly connection.
I mean, what is efficiency without empathy? We’re actively losing a lot more than money, connection, feedback, genuineness, brand, and maybe much, much more.
AI-driven selling was meant to boost conversions. But somewhere between automation and optimization, it made it harder to feel personal.
A merchant on reddit mentioned,
“It doesn’t matter how good your solution is… cutting through that noise has become damn near impossible. And where top reps used to stand out by identifying pain and solving it… now, with ChatGPT, everyone sounds exactly the same.”
Every recommendation, every follow-up, every “you might also like this” feels like it’s coming from the same invisible copywriter. Shoppers sense it. And they are not liking it.
A customer on reddit commented, “AI makes it extremely frustrating. First, it’s super obvious that I’m speaking with an agent. Second, I just click till I can speak with a human.”
According to an Omnisend survey, 42% say today’s AI feels more like an upselling engine than a helpful assistant.
Even sellers are seeing it.
One Redditor vented, “I don’t use LLMs for outreach because my customers are smart enough to tell. Every AI-written email gets ignored.”
So yeah, AI can theoretically accelerate selling. But it’s also flattening personality, inflating volume, and eroding response rates. Because the moment your buyer feels like they’re talking to a bot, the sale’s already over.
And Yes! Gen X was right all along on this; face to face, firm handshake, look them in the eye or honestly, even a simple “hey, wanna talk?” text can beat a perfectly optimized draft.
Scroll through LinkedIn or Instagram reels and you’ll notice it too – even the captions sound AI generated now. You know it the moment you read it. The balanced tone, words are too polished, I guess the world started to talk in the same polite, copy-edited language.
And let’s be honest for a second here. When was the last time we actually got a sale from a blog post? Or did we read a blog post and make a sale?
If you think about it, most of these AI-generated posts aren’t helping us sell; they’re helping us publish. We’re feeding the content machine knowing no one’s really reading. Even when they read, everything sounds just the same, so nothing sticks anymore.
Raptive creators alone published 7.9 million articles in 2024. That’s 37 percent more than the year before. Imagine that!! The Internet is louder than ever and somehow shallower than ever.
And there’s no real voice left anymore, right?
We still remember the slogans from brands that built their own identity. Nike said, “Just Do It.” McDonald’s said, “I’m Lovin’ It.” When was the last time a new brand line hit you like that?
Michael Brenner, former VP of Marketing at SAP, once quoted, “The world has changed. Most content stinks. Attract people through stories they love.”
Let’s just take a quick pulse check on what’s happened to customer support over the years.
AI-powered customer support was supposed to make service smoother, at least that’s what they sold us. But for every reason somehow, it started to feel colder.
On Reddit, one user wrote,
“It’s a mix, tbh. AI’s great for quick fixes, but when it hits a wall, that “let me transfer you” loop is brutal.”
I mean that’s the thing right? Customer support was not just about solving the problem; it was also about solving how someone feels about the problem. AI hasn’t learned that language yet.
“AI can identify problems but can’t solve them. It’s like having a smart assistant who knows exactly what’s wrong with your car but isn’t allowed to touch the engine.”
And CMSWire reported:
Right now, too many companies are using AI to reduce costs first and improve experience second. And when cost-cutting becomes a strategy, connection becomes collateral.
In a 2025 PwC study, 59% of consumers said companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience.
That’s not a small number. That’s more than half your audience saying, “We don’t feel you anymore.”
Flown along in the hype river, many merchants bought into AI customer support thinking it would save time and sanity. But scroll through Shopify’s own community threads and you’ll see the irony- those same merchants, frustrated are demanding to “speak with a human.”
It’s just that the shoe’s on the other foot now only this time; it’s automated.
So, I guess we’re trading brand trust for those perfectly scripted apologies, huh!
Remember when we used to ask, “Can machines think?”
Now we should probably ask, “Can humans still feel when everything’s optimized to think for them?”
Because somewhere along the way, business started mistaking personalization for personhood. The data got sharper, the content copies got cleaner, and yet the connection got meh!!!
Maybe it’s time we start redefining what “AI efficiency” really means.
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