Robb Report published a piece on AI last week. The headline: ‘The Rise of A.I. Has Made Human Interaction the Ultimate Luxury Good’.
The argument is straightforward. As AI automates more of daily life, the wealthy are paying a premium for something that used to be free: another human being who actually cares. A shop assistant who remembers your name. A tailor who insists on three fittings. A concierge who listens instead of prompting you to ‘describe your ideal experience’.
As MIT’s Sherry Turkle puts it: we dream of the truly scarce – human beings who really care.
Robb Report calls it a luxury trend. I think it’s a growth signal.
I wrote earlier this year that AI can’t people, because AI can’t love. That wasn’t a philosophical exercise. It was a statement about where competitive advantage lives in a world where anyone can build anything faster than ever and AI can generate content, qualify leads, personalize onboarding, and run campaigns at scale. If AI can do all of that – and it increasingly can – then what’s left for the humans?
The answer is everything that matters.
The weak ties problem
The Robb Report piece surfaces a concept worth sitting with: weak ties. Those are the casual, low-stakes human interactions – the barista who knows your order, the colleague you only see at offsites, the customer success rep who checks in without an agenda. Technology is quietly replacing these interactions, and the research says they matter enormously for happiness, trust, and loyalty.
My daily habit and favorite coffee shop is Saint Frank’s in Menlo Park. They know us – and our orders – by heart. They always ask questions to learn something new about us. They always engage. They smile and always give eye contact. I’m hooked. I’m not alone. The lines often run long, but nobody cares. We all know the coffee is great and the conversations are uplifting.
In growth terms, weak ties are the customer journey moments that don’t show up in your attribution model, but absolutely show up in your renewal and retention rates. The SDR who sends a genuinely useful article. The onboarding call where someone laughs. The CS check-in where the customer says something they’d never type into a chatbot.
These aren’t inefficiencies. They’re the connective tissue of a truly human customer relationship.
Where this meets the continuum
At CLG Partners, we use the Human/Agentic Continuum to map every tactic in the customer journey across three states: Now (all human), Next (human-led with agents in the loop), and New (agent-led with human supervision). The continuum isn’t about replacing people. It’s about being deliberate, knowing exactly where to hold the line on human augmentation and where to let agents accelerate.
The Robb Report piece accidentally validates what we’ve been telling CEOs and PE firms for months: the companies that move everything to ‘New’ without thinking will erode exactly the kind of trust that drives adoption and advocacy. The companies that get the continuum right – that automate the rote and protect the human moments – will build the kind of customer relationships their competitors can’t replicate with better algorithms.
Consider the 7As. AI is extraordinary at A4 (Acquisition) – optimizing channels, scoring leads, running campaigns at lower cost. It’s getting better at A5 (Activation) – personalizing onboarding sequences, surfacing the right content at the right time. It fails or at best struggles with A7 (Advocacy)? Turning a satisfied customer into someone who picks up the phone and tells a peer ‘you have to work with these people’. That’s still a human sport.
The ‘friction-maxxing’ instinct is real
Robb Report credits The Cut’s Kathryn Jezer-Morton with the term ‘friction-maxxing’ – the deliberate choice to resist time-saving technology in favor of slower, more human experiences. It sounds like a luxury consumer trend, but I see it showing up in enterprises too.
The best CMOs I work with are friction-maxxing on purpose. Not everywhere. Not blindly. In the moments that build trust. They’re keeping human reviewers on brand voice instead of letting AI publish unchecked. They’re insisting on live executive briefings instead of sending AI-generated decks. They’re protecting the customer advisory board from becoming a survey bot.
This isn’t anti-technology. This is strategy. It’s PST applied to the human/agent question: which human interactions do we Preserve because they’re the reason customers stay? Which do we Strengthen by augmenting with AI? And which do we Transform because they’re genuinely better automated?
Growth is still a human sport
The Robb Report piece frames human interaction as a luxury good – something scarce and therefore expensive. I’d frame it differently. Human interaction isn’t a luxury. It’s a competitive advantage that most companies are giving away for free by automating it without thinking.
The companies winning the next decade of growth won’t be the ones with the best AI stack. They’ll be the ones who know exactly which moments need a human – and invest in making the moments that matter extraordinary.
Connect with me or follow CLG Partners.
– Dariusz Paczuski, Founder & Managing Partner, CLG Partners
#CustomerLedGrowth #HumanSideOfStrategy #AIStrategy #HumanAgenticContinuum #CMO #PrivateEquity