Artificial intelligence may be changing how businesses operate, but Jenna Puzzio keeps noticing something decidedly low-tech.
She walks into a salon and no one greets her.
A bathroom isn’t stocked. A corner has been overlooked. A client arrives and the staff seems surprised to see her.
Puzzio notices these things because she spends considerable time inside the businesses she serves. As co-founder of Fill Your Books, she works primarily with salon and spa owners, helping them attract clients and improve the systems that turn those clients into long-term customers.
She had just returned from visiting a client in Virginia when she described the pattern.
Business owners are increasingly interested in what artificial intelligence can automate. Puzzio thinks some of them are getting ahead of themselves.
“Experts are experts because they can do the basics with their eyes closed,” she says.
Before asking AI to automate the customer experience, she argues, businesses should make sure the experience is worth automating.
It is a deceptively simple idea at a moment when companies are being inundated with promises about what artificial intelligence can do.
Puzzio isn’t opposed to AI. She uses it. What concerns her is the mindset behind how some businesses are adopting it.
“I think a lot of people look at AI of, ‘Oh, how can this replace? Or how can this save me time?'” she says.
The better approach, in her view, is to ask how technology can enhance something the business already does well rather than replace it.
The Difference Between “Do It For Me” and “Do It With Me”
That distinction becomes clearer when Puzzio talks about one of the biggest mistakes she sees business owners making.
“They’re using it as a ‘do it for me’ as opposed to ‘do it with me,'” she says.
The first approach outsources the thinking. The second keeps the person responsible for the thinking while using technology to help organize, execute or remember.
Puzzio has a useful analogy for it.
She wants AI to be the screwdriver, not the person building the entire house.
That philosophy becomes especially interesting when applied to customer relationships.
Imagine a salon client named Susan.
During an appointment, Susan mentions that her daughter has just had a baby, making her a grandmother for the first time. She has a vacation coming up. Her 30th wedding anniversary is approaching. She’s trying a new product, and there are details about her haircut and color that should be remembered before her next appointment.
Those details are exactly the kind of information that can disappear during a busy workday.
Puzzio sees an opportunity for AI there.
A stylist could ask an AI assistant to remind her to send Susan a card, check in a week later about the product or remember another detail that deserves a personal follow-up.
Technology isn’t creating the relationship.
It is helping the person maintain it.
As Puzzio puts it, she can use AI “as a tool to help me become more human.”
That may be one of the more useful ways to think about AI in a service business.
The goal isn’t necessarily fewer human interactions. It can be better human interactions.
Automation Doesn’t Eliminate the Need to Know Your Customer
Puzzio is also skeptical of universal rules about which customer interactions should be automated.
Some customers want to send a message and speak with someone before booking an appointment. Others would rather go directly to a website and book without talking to anyone. Some need to see a company’s social media content first. Others rely heavily on reviews or recommendations from friends.
“Everybody’s going to have a different thing that makes them say yes,” she says.
That means an AI chatbot that works beautifully for one customer may leave another feeling as though the business passed them off.
Her conclusion is decidedly old-fashioned.
You have to know your customer.
It is an important counterweight to the current enthusiasm surrounding automation.
Efficiency matters. So does convenience. An AI system that answers a prospective customer’s question at night may prevent that person from moving on to another company simply because nobody responded.
But efficiency and experience aren’t always the same thing.
Most people have experienced the frustration of calling a large company and finding themselves trapped in an automated system when all they want is another person.
Puzzio points to that experience as evidence that consumer resistance to automation isn’t entirely new.
“We don’t want to talk to the robot,” she says, particularly when the robot isn’t solving the problem.
The question for business owners, then, isn’t simply whether an interaction can be automated.
It is whether automating it makes the customer’s experience better.
AI Raises Another Question: What Happens to Communication?
There is a second concern beneath Puzzio’s thinking about artificial intelligence, and it reaches beyond salons or small businesses.
She worries about communication itself.
Puzzio came from a sales background, as did her husband and Fill Your Books co-founder. That experience shaped how she thinks about business.
“Sales and communication is the backbone to any great business,” she says.
But she believes people’s ability to communicate directly is already weakening.
“Communication is a lost art form for me,” Puzzio says. “A lot of people don’t know how to formulate their own thoughts and feelings into a direct way of communicating with another person.”
She is careful not to frame that concern as an argument against technology. She describes herself as neither anti-technology nor opposed to progress.
Her point is more measured: when a tool becomes capable of doing more of our communicating for us, people should think carefully about what they are giving up along the way.
That concern extends to marketing.
Consumers increasingly encounter captions, emails and other content generated with AI. Puzzio doesn’t object to using AI to help create them. What she questions is handing over the entire process.
She describes the difference as using AI to organize and implement your ideas rather than asking it to supply the ideas, write the finished product and publish it untouched.
“People can spot it from a mile away,” she says of generic AI-generated content.
The Basics May Become More Valuable, Not Less
There is a certain irony in all of this.
The more sophisticated artificial intelligence becomes, the more valuable some decidedly human business skills may become.
Listening. Remembering. Reading a customer. Communicating clearly. Knowing when someone wants convenience and when they want another person.
Puzzio believes businesses should first understand the complete client experience, from the initial contact through the moment a satisfied customer leaves a positive review or refers someone else.
Then they can examine that process and identify where AI genuinely improves it.
“What are the pieces of that process that can be helped with some sort of AI tool?” she asks.
Technology might organize information. It might streamline repetitive work. It might help a company create systems so employees aren’t rebuilding the same process for every customer.
But the business owner still needs to understand how a great experience happens before attempting to automate pieces of it.
Puzzio describes it as knowing the process well enough to reverse engineer it.
That is a considerably less dramatic vision of artificial intelligence than the promise that software will run an entire business.
It may also be more useful.
AI can remember that Susan’s anniversary is approaching. It can remind someone to send the card. It can organize the notes from her last appointment and prompt a stylist to ask how she liked the product she took home.
But Susan isn’t building a relationship with the software.
She’s building it with the person who remembered.
For businesses trying to understand where humans belong in an increasingly automated economy, that distinction may be a good place to start.
