Let’s talk about the thing the machine has that you don’t.
Time.
Picture a small construction outfit in Germiston. Eight guys, two bakkies, a bookkeeper who works three days a week. They finished a warehouse extension in June last year. Retention on that job came to a few hundred thousand rand — money they’d already earned and already spent on wages.
Since then the project manager has sent eleven emails. Every one of them got an answer inside a day. That’s the part that gets me. They always answer. Thanks for your patience. The query has been escalated. We’re waiting on sign-off from the client’s quantity surveyor. Here’s a reference number, here’s the name of a person who is, apparently, looking into it.
Fourteen months. Nothing was ever rejected. It just never got approved.
And here’s the thing nobody says out loud at that table: that is not a process failing. That is a process working exactly the way it was built.
Think about how waiting used to work. Before the back office turned into software, delay cost both sides. The clerk who sat on your file had a desk with a pile on it, a manager who noticed the pile, and a phone that rang at four in the afternoon with somebody’s mother on the line. Delay was expensive for the institution too. There was shame attached to it. Somebody had to go home carrying your problem around.
Now the queue is a database and the cost of the delay has been moved, in full, onto the person waiting.
That is a transfer of cost so clean it never shows up anywhere. It’s not in the annual report. Nobody budgeted for it. It didn’t need a decision — it happened the moment the clerk became a workflow and the workflow became a model.
AI didn’t invent this. It industrialised it.
Because a language model is extremely good at the one thing that keeps a claimant quiet: a specific, apologetic, plausible update. Right name, right reference number, sympathetic phrasing, a next step, a date that isn’t quite a commitment. Generated in under a second, for effectively nothing. Ten thousand of them, personalised, at no marginal cost. Each one buys another month of hope.
A no is at least honest. A no gives you somewhere to go — escalate, complain, phone the ombudsman, write the letter, take it to a lawyer. A maybe keeps you. A maybe is the most efficient instrument ever built for making a person wait, and the sender pays nothing to send it.
Which brings us to what people are actually missing. We keep arguing about whether the machine is smart enough, fair enough, biased enough. All of that matters. But the structural change is simpler and much harder to sue over: disputes now get resolved by endurance, not by merit.
Whoever can afford to wait longest wins. And waiting has a price — savings, lawyers, leave days, a boss who lets you take the calls — so the outcome quietly sorts itself by who could absorb the delay. Not by who was right.
That’s not justice with a bug in it. That’s a mechanism, and it’s the same mechanism that’s been used by every institution that ever discovered it’s cheaper to exhaust somebody than to answer them.
The agent era doesn’t fix this. It’s sold as if it will. Your agent can be patient on your behalf — it can sit in the queue, chase the reference number, follow up on day thirty, never lose its temper. Good. Use it.
But do the arithmetic. The institution on the other side has thousands of agents and a legal department and a process built by people who are paid to make the queue defensible. You have one, and its patience is rented from a company that can change the terms, the price, or the product while your case is still open. The asymmetry doesn’t disappear. It just gets a nicer interface.
And your agent’s patience is not your patience. It’s not your weeks.
Because the thing being spent here isn’t money. It’s the calendar.
A life is a deadline. That sounds dramatic until you sit in the room where it’s literal. The seventy-four-year-old waiting on an authorisation for a hip replacement, doing it on painkillers and a walking frame because the file is under review. The widow waiting on a life policy while the bond debit order keeps going out and the estate’s lawyer keeps saying these things take time. The teacher who gave up on the medical claim in month nine because she couldn’t face another hold message, and paid the difference herself.
None of them were refused. They were just kept.
And the cruel part is how reasonable it all sounds. “We’re experiencing high volumes.” “Your query has been escalated.” Those sentences are true, which is what makes them work. High volumes are real. The escalation is real. It’s just that nobody in that chain is holding a clock, and a queue with no clock on it is not a neutral thing. It’s a decision to let people give up.
So if you run anything — a company, a team, a support desk, a claims process, a tender — here’s the part that’s actually yours.
Put a date on every “under review”. Not a promise to look at it. A date by which there will be a decision, and a person’s name next to that date. If you miss it, pay for it — interest on money you’re holding, a credit on the invoice, something that costs you. Delay that costs only the other side isn’t a process, it’s a strategy you haven’t admitted to.
Then change what you measure. Ticket closed is a vanity number that rewards the maybe. Time to answer is the honest one. The company that replies in thirty-six hours when its industry takes three weeks is not competing on model quality, because everyone has the same model now. It’s competing on the one thing that’s genuinely hard to fake: somebody actually looked.
And if you’re the one waiting, stop treating patience as a virtue. Put the request in writing, give them a date, ask for the decision in writing, and escalate on the day they miss it — not the day you run out of energy. Keep the record. Your patience is a real asset and they are spending it.
The machine will always win a waiting contest. It has no children to fetch, no shift that ends, no funeral on Thursday. It will still be there on Monday, and the Monday after that.
You won’t. That’s the whole point of you.
So don’t measure your patience against it. Look at what you’re waiting for. If there’s no date on the decision, there isn’t a decision yet — there’s just a way of holding you.
Give people a date. Pay for your own delay. Answer the email like there’s a person on the other end, because there is, and they’ve got less time than you do.