The Human Differentiator
Service has become shorthand for “we’ll react when you tell us something is broken.” That is not a model that wins, keeps or grows customers in 2026. The interesting question is whether the word itself is holding us back, and what happens to the human edge when AI takes the heavy lifting off the table.
The word service is doing too much heavy lifting
Service, in most businesses, has come to mean one thing: you raise a hand, we lower a ladder. You log a ticket, we close a ticket. You phone in, we pick up. It is reactive by design. And then we wonder why customers do not feel cared for, why renewals wobble, why the account manager who has been there ten years is loved for being responsive yet has not grown the account in three.
I had a conversation recently with Mark Boyer, who runs services at Softcat, and he told a story that lands this perfectly. Imagine the payroll analyst on the last Friday of the month. Three hundred people about to miss their mortgage payment on Monday. Her keyboard has died. What does our beloved IT industry ask her to do? Log a ticket. In our language. In our categories. So a technician sees “keyboard not working” at three on a Friday and books it in for Monday. The house is on fire and we have asked her to file a tax return in a foreign language before we will pass the bucket.
That is not service. That is administration dressed up as service. The word itself has trained us to wait, to process, to respond. The useful reframe, and the one I keep coming back to, is experience. Experience starts long before someone buys, and it never really stops. Service is one slice of it. Calling the whole thing service is part of why so many businesses are stuck reacting when they could be creating.
Reactive is fine. Reactive is not enough
Here is the bit I want commercial leaders to sit with. Most account management, most customer success, most so-called service teams are quietly brilliant at reactive work. The customer rings, the right person picks up, the thing gets sorted, everyone feels warm. That is not nothing. That is the baseline.
The challenge is that reactive excellence never creates the future. It protects what is already there. It does not spot the next problem the customer has not articulated yet. It does not bring a fresh angle to a quarterly review. It does not make trust visible in a way the customer can point at and say, that is why we stay.
Growth lives in the proactive layer. The bit where someone in your business is thinking about the customer’s business cycle, not yours. Producing the right insight when they are doing financial planning, not when your reporting calendar says month-end. That is the Moments That Matter™ work, and it is almost never what teams labelled “service” are set up to do.
The Oura ring moment, and what intentional actually looks like
Mark told me about his Oura ring. Battery life dropped from five days to two overnight. He opened the app, hit the chatbot, sighed the sigh we all sigh, and typed three words: “battery, five days, two.” Diagnostics ran. The response came back: we have found a problem with your ring, a replacement is already on its way. Two days later, a human called to check it had arrived.
No ticket. No portal. No foreign-language tax return. The only human contact was the one that made the brand feel like it cared. Everything else was quietly handled by the machine doing what machines are good at.
That is what intentional looks like. The word intentional is doing a lot of work for me at the moment, because most customer experience is not intentional at all. It is either accidentally brilliant, and we cannot repeat it, or quietly poor, and we hope nobody mentions it. The Oura experience was designed. Someone decided where the human goes and where the human does not need to be. That is the bit I would pay attention to.
“Most customer experience is not intentional. It is either accidentally brilliant and unrepeatable, or quietly poor and politely ignored.”
Where I part company with the room on AI and creativity
There is a popular line going around that AI is going to unleash a wave of creativity across humanity. Everyone becomes an artist. Everyone becomes a maker. I do not buy it, and I will tell you why.
I read an interview with Jerry Seinfeld where he was asked whether McKinsey could have helped him and Larry David avoid burnout writing the show. His answer, roughly: are they funny? No? Then I do not need them. If you are efficient, you are doing it wrong. The show worked because he micromanaged every word, every cast, every edit. Creativity, he was saying, is inefficient by design.
I half agree. The bit I would adjust is this. What Seinfeld described, obsessing over every line, every take, every edit, is actually a system. It is a repeatable, consistent process for excellence. That is not inefficient. That is highly efficient at producing a specific kind of output. Which means creativity has a system underneath it, and the people who already have that system in their heads are the ones AI will supercharge.
My view: AI will not make average people creative. It will make already-creative people far more productive at being creative. It will remove the friction that used to sit between a creative thought and a finished thing. The developer I used to have to hire? I am now writing apps myself in an afternoon. The report I used to dread? Drafted from the transcript in minutes. None of that makes the idea better. It just means the idea gets out of my head and into the world faster. That is the real shift. AI levels up the creative, it does not create the creative.
What that means for your service model
If AI is going to handle the predictable, the diagnostic, the transactional, the reporting, the first-line triage, then the question for any services leader is brutally simple. What are your humans for?
The honest answer in most businesses today is, we have not decided. Humans are doing what AI is about to do better, faster and cheaper, while the genuinely human work, the proactive thinking, the relationship building, the creative reframing of a customer’s problem, sits underused. That is the ugly mirror moment for a lot of services teams right now.
Mark talked about the layer in his model called service outcomes. Not technicians. Not salespeople. People whose job is to talk to people, sit close to the customer, understand the business cycle, bring insight back in. That is where the human differentiator lives. Not in closing tickets faster than the next provider. Not in producing more reports than the next provider. Everybody will have the tooling. Everybody will have the AI. The thing that sets you apart is the white-glove moment delivered by someone who actually thought about you.
The commercial point, plainly
If you call it service, you will keep building a reactive team. If you call it experience, you start designing for the proactive moments that grow accounts. That is not semantics, that is structure. The language you use shapes the org chart, the hiring brief, the KPIs, and ultimately the customer’s view of you.
AI is going to take the reactive layer off your plate whether you plan for it or not. The businesses that win the next decade are the ones using that headspace to put their most creative, most commercially-minded humans back in front of customers, doing the work that only humans can do. The ones that use AI to simply do more reactive work, faster, are in a race to mediocrity, and the finish line is not somewhere you want to be.
Behaviour drives growth. The behaviour you want is proactive, intentional, creative, human. The word service, used the way most businesses use it, quietly works against all four. Worth a thought before your next planning cycle.
