What happens when I can’t tell you to click the blue button, because AI-enabled hyperpersonalization means you don’t have one? 

The death of shared experience is a fundamental paradigm shift…and it will absolutely wreck your customer service department.

At some point, every teen ends up in the same conversation: how do I know that the reality I am experiencing is the same one you are? The context changes (as does the amount of alcohol consumed) but the easy example is always color. I look at the sky and call it blue, and so do you, but that is just because we have both been taught to label the experience that way. How do I know that your blue is my blue?

The truth, as most adults come to realize, is that functionally it doesn’t matter. As long as we agree on the connection between the label and the experience, and both of those are stable, we can communicate with each other.

And that’s useful. One of my many jobs in college was working the IT helpdesk. And it was relatively easy to support people over the phone because the interface was predictable; I can tell you to go to the lower right and click the blue button, because I know what I see is what you see. Sometimes there are errors when people encode the information differently (Do you think the blue button is more of a purple?) but as long as you find a way to translate, it works.

One of the recent promises of AI optimists is fully personalized interfaces. They imagine a world that adapts to us to such a degree that there is no one standard way of engaging. This is often presented as being modular at first, where designers will create discrete blocks that rearrange depending on your needs, and then growing increasingly adaptive as the blocks become smaller and smaller.

But this disrupts one of the most fundamental assumptions that allows humans to collaborate: shared experience. In a future where I have literally no way of replicating the experience you’re having, how am I supposed to support you when you need help? How can we work together, when we literally exist in different worlds?

The easy, AI optimistic answer is that I don’t need to, because the AI also does the supporting and collaborating. But even if we believe that one AI is going to support you with another AI, what happens when the AIs aren’t having the same experience? And how are humans helping you before the support AI gets trained?

Hyperpersonalization feels a clear win; if all my experiences are tailored to fit me perfectly, how can that possibly be a bad thing? But if you take it to the logical conclusion, where the Venn diagram of the experiences between humans drifts to nothing…that has profound implications for humanity.

And for your customer service team. This isn’t just drunken teenage musing; shared experience is fundamental to how businesses currently operate. And so at the same time you’re investing in the latest technology to make hyperpersonalization possible, you have to also invest in the business infrastructure that makes it supportable.