Automation is killing your startup

I just got off a call with Alex from Corgi, the business insurance guys. After spending about 30 minutes talking on a video call, I felt humanized more than any other company that's tried to pitch me in the past year alone.

In 2026 there's a strong pattern of automating away the very critical human parts of business and that's leaving a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.

When's the last time you got an email someone trying to send you a lead list or offer you a demo on their product and immediately felt obligated to ignore it? I'd imagine every single day.

When Alex started the call, we took a brief moment to get to know each other and authentically engage on the landscape of Utah. For context, I absolutely hate small talk. Not because of the context, but because of the level of authenticity most people fail to achieve doing so.

This was authentic, real genuine effort to connect. I'm going to Utah one day. Not because Alex said it was cool, but because I was authentically curious.

Automation in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence cannot replace emotional intelligence. As much as some of us would like to automate away human interaction, there's nothing that can effectively do that.

We are socially wired together on a neurological and biological level that is already fundamentally automated within our bodies. That cannot be artificially replicated.

Sure, there's people socialiizing with chat models, just like we did when the Eliza Chatbots first came out. We're curious people and curious people explore. That is part of our nature.

Why does this matter for business?

Last night I watched Jerry Maguire and I noticed in the begging, business was rustle and bustle, execute, sell more, get it done, embellish and prop people up. The authenticity of that didn't scale. You know what did scale?

Authentic personal relationships.

The human component in business is the single point of failure when it comes to serving and delivering solutions that people want. The people fail? The businesses fail.

Let's look at Matthew Gallagher for a moment, the founder of Medvi. You know the guy who scaled his business to $1b with just one person and AI?

What about the allegations that he was social engineering his way through the market using fake doctors and AI? One customer learning about that behavior would immediately sever that sales connection. Trust begins to erode and the business dies just as fast as it scaled.

If you correlate the emotional and cognitive signals surrounding those events and business, there's a clear threat of automation eating the entire business.

You can fool people, but you cannot replace Authenticity

This leads me to the whole point of writing this. When you attempt to abstract away the human connection of any business, you immediately sacrifice authenticity. It's just as detrimental as having a bad actor doing the sales and disrespecting the people you serve.

It's not easy to prioritize human connection in a world where there's a constant war for our attention, but the ROI for authentic human connection will always win.