|
Justin here for a special post-vacation edition of The Weekly Fizz.
For 8 days straight, I didn’t have a single session with any type of AI.
I also didn’t have a bunch of agents (definitions may vary) running autonomously on my computer back at home. All of my AI was off or idle.
It was bliss.
We don’t have a new pod this week, on account of me enjoying some time away with my family during our normal recording sessions. We’ll be back next week, and we have some great guests coming for future episodes.
I spent the past 8 days on a cruise ship in the Eastern Caribbean, making stops in the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and St. Maarten.
This was the fourth time I’ve been on a cruise in the past three years, and each and every time I complete the same ritual beforehand.
I take special care to NOT purchase the internet package. I remove every single app from the home screen of my iPhone except those I need for travel, my camera, and notes. I’m then completely walled off from what is normally a very active state of engaging with communication, doom scrolling, work, social media, and of course AI apps.
My use of AI has intensified considerably month over month for the past 3 years or so. All in all, it’s been a great thing for me.
While I was on the trip, there were definitely moments where having access to AI would have been nice, but not necessarily nicer than having access to the internet in general.
It would have been nice to ask questions about the places we visited, capture and triage my never-ending stream of thoughts, or quickly learn the rules to gaga ball so I could understand my kids. These may be trivial examples, but AI certainly could have been used in these scenarios.
On the first day of the trip, I had some questions for Guest Services and used the chat app, which can be used without the internet package. There was a virtual assistant that greeted me, but all of my requests were handled by a real person.
I would have thought AI might play a bigger role since some of my questions were likely routine: confirming when rooms would be ready, asking for beds to be rearranged, opening our connecting doors, requesting bottled water, etc.
Knowing what I know about LLMs and AI systems, it is very conceivable that a system could both retrieve and serve common answers, process requests on behalf of the guest into other systems, and more. From a technical point of view, it’s a potential slam dunk.
I spent some daydreaming time wondering why this wasn’t the case. Maybe it was satellite internet reliability, on-ship architecture, software integration challenges, or the cost of the volume of requests that would flow through LLM APIs. All of this is my own hypothesis. I have no idea what the real reasons are.
I think another set of factors is far more likely.
Would using AI in this situation actually improve the customer experience?
Based on my tiny sample size, I think this would probably be pretty difficult to achieve. I didn’t wait long for my questions to get answered. They were answered correctly. My requests were routed to the right people and serviced promptly. I had no complaints, really.
Would using AI in this situation materially improve cost to serve or labor allocations?
Probably not.
I’m guessing there is a pretty small number of guest services professionals who support the chat service. I’m categorically against adopting AI with the primary goal of reducing headcount, and I’m not suggesting this would be a worthwhile endeavor. Even if you could redeploy a few people, that’s simply NOTHING in the bigger picture of how many staff are required on a huge cruise ship.
I’ve come to similar conclusions with our clients. Just because AI could do something doesn’t mean we should.
If something doesn’t make the customer experience better or improve business performance, it isn’t worth doing. That’s always been true.
My social media and news feeds tell a story of everyone racing to figure out AI and deliver the goods for investors. We read over and over that we better get moving: faster, bigger, more agents, more loops, more everything.
My lived experience is much different.
Taking your time matters. Being calm, determined, and focused on the right opportunities and problems matters.
The vacation was fantastic, and I lived it up every minute. And yes, once we were back on land and in the car to the airport, I was catching up and firing some requests at the AI apps on my phone.
This week, I’ve already started to cut back how AI integrates with my day-to-day work in some places, realizing I wanted to be more involved because that’s what would make the result better.
If you’ve been following along with The Fizz for a while now, thank you. I hope we’re able to provide a small amount of perspective to help you find your own way forward with AI.
If you enjoy The Fizz, please share it with your friends.
We’ll see you next week.
|
