I got back from the National Restaurant Association show with a phone full of follow-ups. A few hundred of them, give or take. And I noticed something going through them that I want to write down, because I think it is the most important thing happening in business right now and everyone thinks the AI is saying it correctly, and that's the problem.
For about half of those emails, I had to go back and check my notes to figure out who the person was. Nothing in the message itself told me. I got "Great connecting at NRA." "Loved our conversation." "Wanted to follow up on what we discussed." Discussed what? With who? The email did not contain a single detail that could only have come from actually talking to me. No reference to the thing we stood there and talked about. No callback to the moment one of us said something the other did not expect. No reference to one of my very opinionated but informed takes on the direction of AI. Just a smooth, friendly, grammatically perfect block of text that could have been sent to me or to four hundred other people, and almost certainly was.
I know what happened, because I do this work for a living. They scraped the badge list, fed it to a model, and asked it to write warm personalized follow-ups at scale. Maybe they even tweaked the prompt to run an email that would drive conversion. Two seconds per email. And every one of them came out sounding like it cared.
That is the problem. Not that the emails were bad. They were not bad. They were polished. The problem is that they all sounded like they cared, and none of them did, and now I cannot tell the difference between the person who actually remembers our conversation and the person who fed my name to a machine. The connection got buried. The very tool that was supposed to help them reach me and revolutionize how easy it was actually erased the one thing that would have made me answer.
Here is the part the AI crowd keeps getting backwards.
The story everyone tells is that AI is going to make outreach better. Smarter. More personalized. More human, even. AI is changing how everyone works, and it is saving hours per week. And on the surface that is true. The emails are more polished than what most of these people could have written themselves. The grammar is cleaner. The tone is warmer. By every measurable standard, the machine improved the email.
And it made the email worthless.
Because the value of a personal follow-up was never in how it read. It was in what it proved. A real follow-up, the kind a person wrote themselves because they actually remembered you, was expensive. It cost attention. It meant that out of everyone they met, you were one they thought about afterward, well enough to recall the specific thing you said and write it down. The polish was never the point. The cost was the point. The effort was the proof. Expensive and time consuming versus automated and efficient, the fact that you took the expensive route means something.
AI took that cost to zero. Now anyone can produce a follow-up that looks like they remembered you. I spent time on a Hospitality Expert website that had no fewer than 50 articles. All of them pertinent, and every one of them completely AI written. No editing by a human at all. I am sure the entire site was a perfectly curated AI making AI articles on AI. I expect fully to see a version of this article on there in the next 7 days. This ability to connect in two seconds to four hundred people at once, was filled with intention to show you cared. And the instant looking like you cared became free, looking like you cared became worthless. Not less valuable. Worthless. A connection that costs nothing to curate and develop carries no information. It is a cacophony in a nice suit with an apron. Placing the magic apron on it won't make it a chef.
Which leaves exactly one thing standing that the machine can't fake, because the machine was never the part that mattered.
Actually caring.
I spent thirty years in restaurants before I did anything else, and the single most valuable skill, the one that separated the places people came back to from the places they forgot, was remembering the regular. Those customers who are there when the weather is bad, eating the same dish they always order.
Not the data about the regular. Any point-of-sale system can store that he orders the chicken bacon ranch wrap, sub fried chicken. That is data. Storing data is free. What was never free, what no system could do, was the moment the regular walked in and somebody behind the counter looked up and knew him. Knew the order. Knew his daughter just started at the community college. Asked about it and meant it.
That was hospitality. And the reason it was hospitality is that it was expensive. I only ever had to remember one joke a day, and I told it over and over to each customer. That interaction was unique to that customer even though I did it 100 times. It required me being a human to spend attention on another human being and remember it across time, with no prompt, because I actually cared enough to remember. Every time I would come across a bicentennial quarter, I would set it aside for Mr. Morris. Morris collected them because that was the year he married his wife in '76. I hadn't been born yet, but he would bring me a regular quarter back if he didn't have one. You could not buy it. You could not install it. You could not scale it. You could only do it, one person at a time, by paying attention the way a machine cannot.
Every operator knows that the place that remembers you beats the place with the better food and the worse memory. The place that gets the order right every time, not even the one that has the best food. It's not always that way, but it is more often than the food people want to admit.
Here is what just happened to that skill. It got more valuable, not less.
For years, the personal touch was rare in restaurants and common everywhere else. A good server remembered you. A good email, in the days when people wrote their own, also kind of remembered you, or at least the writer had to try. The bar for "looks like they care" was low enough that effort cleared it most places.
Now the machine clears that bar everywhere, instantly, for free. Which means the bar no longer separates anyone. Everyone's outreach looks personal. Everyone's follow-up sounds warm. The entire world now operates at the level of the polished generic email, which is to say, the level of fake attention produced at scale.
And in that world, the only thing that stands out is the thing that was always the actual point. Real attention. The person who remembered the specific argument. The operator who knew your daughter started at the community college and asked, unprompted, because they held it in their head and not in a database. The follow-up that referenced the exact thing you said, because the person writing it was actually there and actually listening.
That used to be a nice touch. Now it is the whole game, because it is the only thing left that the machine cannot counterfeit.
So this is not a piece about how AI is ruining connection.
I am not interested in that piece. I use these tools every day and I am not going back. I spend hours every day fine tuning AI implementations. This is a piece about where the value moved, because it moved, and the operators who see where it went are going to eat the ones who do not.
The move is this. AI did not destroy the value of caring. It relocated it. It took all the value out of looking like you care, which used to be most of the value, and shoved it entirely into actually caring, which used to be a smaller part because the looking and the caring traveled together. Now they have split. The looking is free and worthless. The caring is rare and worth everything. If anything, it is easier now to show you actually care. Where AI matters is giving you the time, attention, and freedom to actually care again. I know I had a hard time caring when I was running grill because 3 people called out.
The restaurateur or GM who understands this does not stop using the tools. They use the tools for the part that was always supposed to be cheap, the logistics, the drafting, the scheduling, the grunt work, and they take every minute the tools give back and spend it on the part that was always supposed to be expensive. The attention. The memory. The specific human thing that proves a person was actually paying attention to another person.
Automate the part nobody was ever moved by. Protect, with everything you have, the part that was the only reason anyone ever came back.
If I have to check my notes to figure out who you are, you have already lost, and you lost because you used the most powerful tool ever built to automate away the one thing that was ever going to make me answer. The machine made caring free. That is exactly why it is worthless now. The only thing left worth anything is the thing it cannot do.
Every call I scheduled, and every hour I have spent with connections from the show, they remembered something about why we were connecting.
Remember the regular. It was always the whole job. It is just that now, finally, everyone else has automated themselves out of being able to.
— Donnie