Episode transcription

(Be aware this transcription was done by AI and might contain some mistakes)

Fabrice Neuman (00:00)
The longitudinal research on well-being from the Harvard study of adult development running since 1938 to more recent epidemiological work keeps landing on the same finding. The quality of human relationships is the single strongest predictor of flourishing. And that's about it. That was an excerpt from Your Life is the Sum Total of 2000 Mondays by Joan Westenberg, link to her full article in the show notes.

Anne Trager (00:32)
So press 3 to hear a real human. Hi everyone and welcome to the Human Pulse Podcast where we talk about living well with technology. I'm Anne Trager, a human potential and performance coach.

Fabrice Neuman (00:47)
And I'm Fabrice Neuman a tech consultant for small businesses.

Anne Trager (00:51)
This is episode 31, recorded on February 8, 2026.

Fabrice Neuman (00:56)
Human Pulse is usually never longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.

Anne Trager (01:01)
So a couple of weeks ago, I stopped scrolling on LinkedIn when I saw someone in the airline industry comment on companies charging a fee to speak to a real human for customer service. So would you pay is the question they asked. Would you?

Fabrice Neuman (01:16)
Would I? Or actually, ⁓ do I want to speak to a human instead of a robot when I'm looking for information? I'd say yes, more often than not, I guess. Because we all had this very poor experience of trying to find the relevant information by pressing buttons all over the place and just getting this feeling of running in circles, right? And we finally end up, I...

did that several times, screaming into the phone or typing in capital letters, you know, into the chatbot interface. I WANT TO SPEAK TO A HUMAN! Darn it. So yes, I guess I would. The question goes one step further, right? Your question, which is would I pay extra for it? And it's not that clear for me. First, because why do I have to, you know,

Anne Trager (01:55)
Hahaha

Mm.

Fabrice Neuman (02:10)
not to be ⁓ too political here, but it seems to infer that humans are by definition more expensive than machines. Or put another way that using tech is free and humans are not. But also because I'm not always sure it will give me a better result. So I will turn to you for the same question. Would you?

Anne Trager (02:33)
Well, you're bringing up so many points which is why I stopped scrolling on LinkedIn because it's not a simple question. Now I totally would pay extra but that's because every time that I have to deal with one of those machines on a call my palms get all sweaty and I lose my calm immediately like even before the call starts. Just thinking about it now, you know, this happens. I have a physiological response. So I have rituals in place to help me with this one.

Fabrice Neuman (02:55)
Hahaha

Anne Trager (03:02)
And one of those, by the way, as you know very well, is asking you to handle anything that has one of those press 2, to you know, whatever. just like, aah, anyway. So I get it. In fact, I get the whole idea of paying extra for human being. Let's face it, my whole business is based on giving people a place to stop being machine-like, first of all, which is what everybody's doing in the workplace right now, being more productive, more productive, more productive.

Fabrice Neuman (03:10)
Very true.

Anne Trager (03:32)
always focused on doing and to have some time as my clients say to think that is to slow down and to talk to a real human being without any outcomes attached. That's what coaching is. The irony is of course that when they slow down and they stop doing this leads to better more efficient doing and outcomes. That's my business. It's paying for a human.

Fabrice Neuman (03:59)
Yeah, well, I guess we can agree on the fact that being or acting like a machine and talking to a machine are two different things.

Anne Trager (04:08)
Yes. So here we are today talking about ⁓ talking to machines or to humans. So first of all, I wondered if it really is a trend that we want to talk to humans. So I did some research, thank you Notebook LM, which pulled up, know, 41 resources and 41 sources, 21 of them worthy of a report on the topic and so on. Okay, yes, thank you AI for that.

What came from this research is interaction is in fact being repositioned as a monetized luxury good right now. Brands are increasingly charging a premium for access to human agents for complex or what they call high empathy interactions. So according to one source, which admittedly was a very small survey of only 600 people,

reported that 75 % of consumers report frustration with AI-driven service. So right now, in our very small sample size, it's 100 % because you expressed it and I expressed it, but anyway, So from that perspective and my own confirmation bias, that sounds about right, 75 % of consumers. But again, it's confirmation bias. I have no idea. It's too small a sample to really know...

Fabrice Neuman (05:30)
Well, I have to say that sometimes I'd rather not speak to someone who obviously doesn't know what they're talking about. during those times I get as enraged as I am with a nonsensical AI bot. You can hear me sometimes screaming into the phone or almost because I have someone trying to get me through all the...

you know, steps of a procedure on a technical thing that I know a lot more about than the person I'm speaking to and it's very annoying. ⁓ But okay, that's my pet peeve. ⁓ But I guess I'm also a bit saddened by the fact that it seems that as a species we tend to rediscover time and again who and what we are.

Anne Trager (06:07)
Yeah.

Fabrice Neuman (06:20)
We, as we said at the beginning, we prefer talking to real human counterparts. We know that for a fact, right? And we still try to replace the human part. And to me, it's just a very inefficient and quite frankly disappointing use of technology.

Anne Trager (06:37)
Yeah, I totally agree. And why is it that we're always trying to... Why are we trying to humans? Why are we trying to imitate humans? I don't know. These are all really good questions. Okay, but I want to go back to this survey, the same survey, because it says % of consumers reported...

reduced brand loyalty when human support is removed entirely. So that's interesting as well. So you say you don't like so much talking to humans who don't know what they're talking about, ⁓ which I understand. And we really don't trust the AI. Or we don't want to be talking to the AI in any case in those kinds of...

customer services situations. So what I'm seeing in all of this is that people are already getting really frustrated with AI and machine interaction. It hasn't been around that long in the grand scheme of things. And people are really feeling AI fatigue. And while that's happening, there's also this rise in agent to agent economy, they call it, all around. That is,

Fabrice Neuman (07:48)
Hmm.

Anne Trager (07:50)
AI talking to AI. mean, you see it all over social media, you have, you know, AI slop respond and comments that are response by AI slop. I mean, it's, it's not even amusing anymore. Anyway, there are other things that are happening for us to predict that by 2026, human visits to banking websites will drop by 20%. I don't know, not me. I mean, I'm not going to send a machine to do my banking for me, but there will be machine initiated traffic.

Fabrice Neuman (08:00)
Yeah.

Hmm

Anne Trager (08:19)
will increase as AI agents increase and interact directly with brand systems and so forth.

While all of that is happening, there appears to be still a real opportunity in being human. And that's what I wanted to talk about today.

Fabrice Neuman (08:38)
Yeah, well, so there's obviously AI fatigue. I think one of the reasons is the fact that ⁓ there are so many promises, you know, ⁓ so this tech doesn't really work, but that's OK. We're going to add more tech to it so it will answer better. you know, the chat bots before AIs ⁓ on websites, you know, trying to answer your question because because brands ⁓

don't have customer service anymore, right? So you can ask your question in this little chat interface. then you, so for example, you say, how can I get more data on my ⁓ cell phone plan, right? And then the answer would be, ⁓ do you want to change your phone? Right? And that's very annoying. So with LLMs, the chat bots understand a little better, but still,

Anne Trager (09:26)
You

Fabrice Neuman (09:35)
they're not up there. And I think this is one of the reasons why we're so ⁓ tired of those.

Anne Trager (09:43)
It reminds me of the advertisement that Claude put out against OpenAI and their advertising and we will link to it in the show notes and I'm not going to give away the answer. ⁓ Just go click on the show notes, click on the link and watch that ad which is hysterical. Anyway, go ahead.

Fabrice Neuman (09:57)
Maybe.

And

it's another whole can of worms because I'm not sure ⁓ Anthropic creator Claude is so honest about it as well. anyway, but talking to machines and that I don't have a problem with that, right? ⁓ Because let's say as long as I don't have to stay and listen to their conversations.

Anne Trager (10:08)
Yes.

True, true, but that's another story. Okay. We were talking about machines talking to machines.

Nice.

Fabrice Neuman (10:32)
The thing is, it also comes to, ⁓ it comes with the race to automate all the things with all the AI agents that are developed and pushed hard for us to adopt, right? And once again, we are basically talking about Claude. The latest of those tools is the Open Claw thing, you know, this thing that changed names several times in the last couple of weeks.

as we record. ⁓

Anne Trager (11:02)
So you might

need to explain what it is in a few words for those who haven't been following this breaking news.

Fabrice Neuman (11:07)
True. Well,

you can search for OpenClaw, but basically it's a piece of software that relies on LLM, which can be Claude or something else, but you can install on your own machine and depending on how ⁓ free range you give ⁓ the tool, can have it create ⁓ calendar events in your calendar based on what the machine can...

reading your text messages and or your emails or your ⁓ Slack messages or what have you. And so you can automate and let the machine decide for you many things. And some people also even gave their ⁓ bank credentials to go online and buy things for them because you ask it, and that's my point actually. ⁓

Well, so I want to go someplace maybe for a vacation and so do that, organize it for me and buy things for me. Yeah. But that's the thing. So all the demos I see are very dehumanizing for sure. The early adopters, as I was describing, so it seems they all try to delegate everything, even what could be just like nice family moments, just in the name of efficiency.

And so one example I was referring to is organizing ⁓ vacation trips. it could be a nice family discussion instead of letting an AI agent decide, you know, when to go, where to go and how long to stay and what have you. To me, this leads to the obvious next step, which is to let the AI agent to go on vacation for you, which is... This is weird.

Anne Trager (12:58)
Hahaha

Fabrice Neuman (13:01)
⁓ To me this is weird. So we are so trying to dehumanize everything. Why are we doing that?

Anne Trager (13:01)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it's as if we're running away from our humanity in a very strange kind of way. And in the workplace as well. It's like more productive, be more productive and all of that. And we forget everything that makes for creativity and judgment and interesting ideas and novelty. Anyway, there's something... Yeah, yeah.

Fabrice Neuman (13:10)
Yeah.

Yeah. So it seems that we are afraid of something.

also, know, ⁓ more and more we're talking about this potential AI bubble being ⁓ just days or weeks away to bursting, right? And one of the reasons why for me is because I think there's a gap getting bigger and bigger between what tech is offering and what people are willing to use.

And all those promises, AI doing this, AI doing that, blah, blah, but are we willing to use all of that and why? And I think this will inevitably lead to a course correction.

Anne Trager (14:01)
Yeah.

And I agree with you there and I think it's also resonant with something that is very very human that we've known for a very very long time happiness is correlated with happiness comes from having results that are higher than the expectations and right now all we have are expectations and very very few results and that's just going to be that's going to create so much blowback and and I think it's already happening if we

refer to the AI fatigue that's happening right now. So in the meantime, before the course correction happens, okay, since we're not, I just want to talk a little bit about where this what they call empathy economy is that is, you know, where are humans in the loop, as as we say, in this area, where is it happening? Where are what are the models? So

Fabrice Neuman (14:52)
Mm-hmm.

Anne Trager (15:01)
Organizations are adopting models similar to like low cost airlines, okay, where you have to pay for everything. So where there's a lot of automation and then any human lead service is a paid upgrade. So that's what we're seeing. So you get things called, ⁓ you know, human at hello, I love the names that these things come up with, okay, which is when when customers can explicitly choose to bypass a AI. ⁓

Fabrice Neuman (15:13)
Mm-hmm.

Hmph.

Anne Trager (15:28)
Often that comes at a higher cost so beware when you say let me speak to a human Help human, please it could be costing you more now, okay? Yeah, yeah and ⁓ So there is a real drive to monetize that because people are willing to pay for for those

Fabrice Neuman (15:31)
Yeah.

Yeah, they will provide, but for a cost.

Well,

let me push back. ⁓ People want that. It doesn't mean they're willing to pay. But because people want that, then all of a sudden it becomes a new market to address. Yes.

Anne Trager (15:54)
Yeah, yeah, people want that. It doesn't mean that.

Exactly, exactly. Well, which is the nature of the market economy.

So you're seeing, for example, on healthcare platforms that offer human answering versus AI answering, which of course costs a lot more when you have a human there. ⁓ So anyway, that's happening. And there are, I found this, this plat

Fabrice Neuman (16:16)
Mm-hmm

Anne Trager (16:28)
form called rentahuman.ai, where AI agents autonomously hire humans to perform physical or sensory tasks that robotics cannot yet manage. That's kind of weird. And the people behind rentahuman refer to it as meat space. Okay, so it's like total commoditization of like our humanity. I don't know. It's so weird.

Fabrice Neuman (16:42)
Yeah.

And to be clear, meat

space is written M-E-A-T like the sack of meat we all are.

Anne Trager (16:55)
Yes, right. The sack of meat we

all are. So anyway, that's just really weird.

Fabrice Neuman (17:04)
Yeah, it is weird. ⁓ What I see here is a paradigm shift in the making. You know, with companies trying many things to see what sticks, which is basically the history of tech in the last couple of decades. ⁓ And for now, the result is just a mind-boggling maze of services that no human can actually grasp. And it's really too bad.

Anne Trager (17:27)
Yeah, yeah.

I totally agree. I totally agree. And what we're also seeing is that some thought leaders in the customer service industry, for example, are predicting a lot of problems with this kind of approach because what's happening is that we're installing AI to do the easy stuff and humans are getting nothing but the hard stuff. And so when you offload all of the easy tasks to AI,

Fabrice Neuman (17:50)
Mm.

Anne Trager (17:54)
then what happens is that the remaining human workloads are nothing but a hundred percent high stress. And we all know that humans don't work well when it's a hundred percent high stress. So again, very strange shifting in the workplace right now.

Fabrice Neuman (18:13)
Yeah. And to me, it's very similar to what's happening with AI coding. you know, like AI tools are getting better and better at coding our services and apps. know, it's once again, Claude code and then there's open AI Codex You know, they're all fighting to get the coding jobs basically. And to me, so as long as those tools are used by people who actually know how to code, it's okay. It's

beneficial to all of us, because they can be tools to help people who know. But then we see that already some people say that we don't need programmers anymore, or we won't need them anymore because AI can do it. And then what happens when we delegate all apps and services creation to AI, and there's a problem.

And the risk is always the loss of skills because then something breaks and we don't know how to fix it anymore.

That's the real problem with this thing. So we see that with the vibe coding. I heard somewhere that on different app stores, whether it's the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, the number of apps that are submitted just rose by 20 or maybe 50%.

in the last year or something, just because anybody can quote unquote vibe code an application. But then, OK, the application works, sort of. But then ⁓ if something breaks, they don't know anything about, you know, fixing the problem. let alone, you know, all the potential security problems, because OK, so they don't even think about it.

Anne Trager (19:57)
Yeah.

Mm.

Yeah, yeah. And we have to put a little security note here about if you're going to use open claw or any of that. I mean really, beware.

Fabrice Neuman (20:08)
So.

It's yes. Yeah,

yeah, really giving. So first of all, giving it access to all your information is already questionable. But then we have absolutely no idea yet how it handles the security of all of it. So so

Anne Trager (20:26)
Quite.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fabrice Neuman (20:40)
To me, leaving only the hard stuff to humans also feels like we are doing the opposite of what tools should do.

Anne Trager (20:46)
Yeah, I'm on board with you there. mean, we want to... We as human beings obviously want to offload the boring stuff, which is also the easy stuff, and we want to as well make our lives easier. Okay, so there's a contradiction there because if we offload all the easy stuff, then are we really making our lives easier? Because all we're left with is the hard stuff, okay? But it's a perfectly human contradiction because in reality, we always want a balance between easier and hard stuff.

Fabrice Neuman (20:59)
That's what tools are for. ⁓

Yeah. ⁓

Anne Trager (21:15)
This is the way we are humans. We never like everything to be the same. We want easy stuff, we want hard And so this all or nothing approach is just not applicable to human beings. But I want to get out of this rabbit hole and move back to something a little bit more positive here because while all of this is going on there are opportunities for human beings because

Fabrice Neuman (21:26)
Hmph.

Anne Trager (21:39)
humans are willing to pay for humans still. It means that things like human done curation of information is valued.

Fabrice Neuman (21:42)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, I would

want to interject here because this is something that we've said from the beginning of AI that the importance of finding the right sources and going back to ⁓ read only the good sources, the ones you choose, that are actually well curated, your quote unquote newspaper, the website that you trust. Once again, this is the trust issue.

Anne Trager (22:06)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, yes.

Fabrice Neuman (22:21)
where AI is not yet capable of giving.

Anne Trager (22:25)
Well, and the other area that we're seeing an impact is that quite obviously having unpolished, clearly done by human videos like ours, these are the ones that get the most following. I mean, no, that are very effective. Whereas those nice, clear, AI ones, they're kind of amusing for a while, but they don't actually last that long.

Fabrice Neuman (22:37)
Like ours, you mean?

Anne Trager (22:50)
⁓ In the luxury industry, find a lot of, you know, made by human tags and a lot of storytelling about the artisans who are, you know, doing all the stuff that we didn't, don't really want to be doing. So anyway, again, we go back to that contradiction. ⁓ I even saw that there are some shifts in Medicare, which actually could be a you know, a good thing. I don't know enough about it, but I'll throw it out there anyway, that in the physician fee schedule includes a

Fabrice Neuman (22:54)
Hmm.

Anne Trager (23:19)
tiny, tiny little reimbursement increase to support human-led care for complex chronic conditions. Maybe it's a move in the right direction. Again, I don't know enough about it to really be able to speak about that.

Fabrice Neuman (23:26)
Interesting.

Anne Trager (23:33)
Well, so I believe that ultimately we're going to settle on something that is a mix between human and machine. As always, it's going to be a balance between that. mean, already now, millennials and Gen Xers are interested in, for example, in medical care to have AI assisted diagnosis, but only if it is reviewed by a doctor.

Okay, to a large proportion. And actually the general population does as well to a lesser proportion. It's in the younger generation that it's a little bit higher in percentages. Yeah, yeah. So the numbers I saw were 71 % of millennials and Gen Xers and 56 % of the general population. So it's the majority, okay. So in the end, for now, it looks like there's still room for humans.

Fabrice Neuman (24:08)
How interesting.

Yeah.

Anne Trager (24:24)
and that ultimately the best solutions we will find will probably be hybrid solutions.

Fabrice Neuman (24:30)
Well, on that note, that's it for episode 31. Thank you all for joining us. Visit humanpalspodcast.com for links in past episodes.

Anne Trager (24:38)
Thank you for subscribing and reviewing this wherever you listen to your podcasts. It helps other people to find us. You can also share this particular episode with one person around you who might find it interesting.

Fabrice Neuman (24:51)
and we'll see you in more or less two weeks. Bye.

Anne Trager (24:54)
Bye everyone.