AI Won’t Replace People—It Will Replace Broken Handoffs

Stu Sjouwerman is co-founder and CEO of ReadingMinds, a pioneering AI-moderated interview platform for conducting sentiment analysis.

Rather than replacing workers, one opportunity AI offers is to strengthen the handoffs between them. In this context, handoffs refer to the transfers of customer data between different departments and systems.

Organizations have traditionally struggled to manage the many handoffs that occur between when a consumer shows interest in a product or service and when the product or service is delivered and the transaction is completed.

A lot of information is shared by customers throughout this process. Unfortunately, much of that information is lost or diluted as it moves through the organization.

For instance, a sales rep receives information from a customer about their order and dutifully enters it into the CRM. A manager reviews the order pipeline. Marketing creates messaging. R&D makes product or service adjustments. But by the time the customer’s initial input reaches the decision makers, the original context is lost. The emotion, urgency and evidence are gone.

The problem isn’t the ability to collect customer feedback. The problem is sustaining the accuracy of that information throughout the organization and across departments without losing meaning along the way.

How Much Gets Lost In Transit

Walk the floor of a retention program at almost any B2B company, and you’ll see this play out again and again. Product development has usage data. Customer success has call notes. Marketing has campaign engagement. Sales has CRM records. Support has tickets. Finance has renewal data. Executives have dashboards.

Every team has learned something from the customer, but almost nobody benefits from what others have already discovered.

Many organizations miss the nuanced insights that mean so much more than a CRM note: the specific words used, the voice inflection and the urgency. These are insights that don’t fit neatly into a dropdown field.​