Last week I’m having coffee with the Head of Support at one of our customers. Phone on the table, dashboard open. Everything green. SLA met. Average resolution time better than last year. “Tickets closed” per agent is up. And she doesn’t look victorious. She looks tired.
“Igor,” she says, “we’ve optimized support to the point of exhaustion. But the team is at the edge. And customers… they’re not any happier. They’re just more used to everything being fast. And when it’s not, they lose it instantly.” That “PowerPoint peace,” where everything is green, often just means the problems are neatly hidden inside the averages.
This is what keeps getting confirmed for me: customer service is no longer a race for speed. It’s a race for a sense of safety. For years we measured good support through effort: wait time, call length, tickets per hour. The logic was simple: friction is normal, so “less friction” is already a win. AI brings something that feels unfair to humans: a zero-friction baseline. Instant answers. Context. Consistency. 24/7. And with that, the standard moves. My thesis is simple: AI doesn’t make people unnecessary. It makes average human support unnecessary.
The most dangerous lie I still hear in companies is: “If we’re just faster, it will be better.” It won’t. If you’re only faster, you’re just average at a higher speed.
With this customer, we made a brutal, practical cut. We took the last few hundred contacts and sliced them by content. Most of it wasn’t “support” in the real sense. It was administrative ping-pong.
An agent resolves these in two minutes. The customer often gets to them in two hours - because they’re waiting. And then everyone’s surprised the team is drained. Not drained by complex cases. Drained by routine that eats the day and kills focus. And then “that” call comes in. She shows me a log entry from last week. A key customer. Complex case. Something went wrong in implementation, the damage is real, internal pressure on the customer side is high. The customer opens with: “If I don’t get a human today, I’m shutting this down. I’m done with bots and being bounced around.”
The agent on the other side has already had three hours of routine questions and twenty micro-interruptions. And now, in five minutes, they have to do something that is actually a professional discipline: de-escalate, take ownership, build a plan, and restore trust. Best detail? The customer adds: “I don’t need an apology. I need you to tell me who owns this and what the next step is.” That’s the new support. Not faster. More mature.
And this is where you see why AI isn’t a threat to humans. AI is a threat to the idea that a human in support is just a ticket intake machine. That’s why we positioned Kinetara as a way to unload the team. Not as a replacement for people, but as a filter and accelerator for the simple stuff. Simple cases go down the fast lane:
The biggest value isn’t that AI “answers.” The biggest value is that it gives people their focus back. Because in reality: your best agents aren’t expensive so they can answer “where’s my invoice” fifty times a day. They’re expensive so they can solve the things that can break the relationship.
Here’s the part leadership loves to skip: when AI takes the routine, humans are left with the hard stuff. Average complexity goes up. What remains are things with consequences. Money. Relationships. Ego. Panic. If you still measure them by “tickets per hour” at that moment, you’re basically saying: “Now solve the hardest cases, but still work like an assembly line.” That’s like telling a surgeon: “Today you’ve got three complications, but please keep your average operating time the same.”
That’s why I suggested one more shift for this customer: your KPIs and your compass need to follow the new reality. If AI sets the baseline, the human part of support is no longer “faster.” It’s “better.” Better means:
And this is where a feedback loop like InstantFeedback makes sense. Not as “another survey,” but as a system that shows you - in real time - where trust is cracking. I’m not only interested in whether the ticket is closed. I’m interested in whether that customer would trust the same team again. One line I’ve been saying more often lately: AI doesn’t lighten support. It removes the excuses. And another one that’s even more uncomfortable: if you have AI and you’re still average, that’s a choice, not a situation.
One last Friday thought: if AI takes the routine in your support, are you ready to move your people into a higher league? And do you have a system that supports them - or are you still measuring them like “password reset” is the peak of their day? One sentence worth hanging on the wall: AI will take your excuse in support. And it will leave you the truth.
And the truth is: going forward, customers will pay for one thing only - a sense that someone is present, accountable, and on their side. If you want, I’d be happy to jump on a quick call. Not about whether AI is coming. But how to put it in place so it simplifies the simple for the customer, gives your team capacity back, and lifts the human part of support to where it actually creates trust.