Let’s talk about the day “talk to a human” stopped being something you were entitled to and started being something you buy.
There’s a scene that’s gone normal this year. You need something fixed — a charge you don’t recognise, a flight that moved, an account that got locked. You open the app. The machine is right there. Instant, polite, infinite patience, no queue. And it can’t actually fix the thing, so it offers to connect you to a person. Then it tells you the wait is two days. Or it offers you priority support for a monthly fee. Or — and this is the one — there is no number anymore at all. The door marked human has been bricked over.
Nobody sat in a room and decided they dislike you. That’s what makes it worth understanding.
Here’s the mechanism. Your business has two kinds of customer now. One is a person. The other is software — an agent that shops, books, cancels, compares and complains on somebody else’s behalf. And those two cost wildly different amounts to serve. The agent is fast, legible, never angry, never tired, asks in clean structured language and finishes in a second. The human is slow, unpredictable, emotional, and occasionally expensive in ways no dashboard captures.
Follow the money. It doesn’t point at “we hate humans.” It points at margin. When one actor costs near zero to serve and the other costs real money, any system left to optimise on its own will quietly start treating the expensive one as friction. Not a person. Friction. A cost line.
And once you see it that way, the last year makes a different kind of sense. Why the payment networks spent 2026 building rails so machines could buy from machines. Why shopping moved inside a chat window. Why so much of the new plumbing that got built this year had an agent on both ends and no human in the middle at all. The industry calls it efficiency. Fine. It is. It’s just not the kind of efficiency that includes you.
Now here’s the part that should bother you. Once a business starts optimising for the machine customer, it starts writing for the machine customer. Prices get published in a format a model can parse. Policies get written so an agent can act on them without ever asking. Marketing shifts from persuading a person to being legible to software. All rational. Every seller wants to be the one the agent picks.
But look at the other side of the counter. The human who walks in — the one without a well-trained agent, the one who doesn’t know how to make the machine run the errand — is now the slow lane. The leftovers. And that is where a new kind of class line gets drawn, and it isn’t about money. It’s about whether you can be served at all.
There is this older thing worth remembering. The counter. The person behind it. You walk in, you get a hearing, you get treated like a customer because you showed up. That was never charity. It was a commercial promise: engage with us fairly and we engage back. That promise is now a pricing decision. And a pricing decision can be reversed by somebody with more leverage than you have, on a Tuesday, quietly.
So what do you do with this.
If you run a company, the operator lesson is blunt. Do not let your human path rot. I don’t mean keep a human on every ticket — that isn’t the business you’re in. I mean measure the human path as its own number, and watch it. Because there’s a specific kind of damage that happens when the only people who still bother to call you are the ones the machine couldn’t satisfy. Those are your most attentive customers. The ones who’ll still be here in three years. You saved a bit of money on service and spent it on the exact trust that got you the customer in the first place. That’s not a saving. That’s a withdrawal.
And if you’re the person on the outside, the move is simpler than it sounds. Stop being the costly actor to serve. Get an agent that handles the dull errands, and actually use it. Learn the machine path, because the machine path is where the service went. Then keep one thing in your own hands: the ability to escalate to a person with authority. Not a script. Not a bot pretending to care. Someone who can actually decide. Treat that as infrastructure you own, not a favour you’re hoping for.
Because the principle underneath outlasts every one of these rails. Being served should not depend on being cheap to serve. The moment a business decides its most patient, most affordable, most agreeable customer is the one without a body — the human becomes the overhead. And a human treated as overhead is one step from a human treated as optional.
The machines can have the queue. They don’t get to decide who the queue was ever for.