After reading the HBR case, something that I’ve been thinking about is that in class and even in all our LinguaLeap work these past weeks, we talk a lot about how just because you can ship something fast doesn’t mean you should. There’s always this tension between wanting to look innovative and actually being ready to deliver something trustworthy, aligned with your brand, and aligned with the kind of ethical bar you want to set. In this case, the team’s excitement about the AI salesbot feels exactly like that: a push to be “ahead” without asking whether the thing they’re about to ship is even ready to represent them.
If I were on that team, I wouldn’t approve immediate deployment, not because AI is inherently too risky, but because the way this bot is positioned right now is a setup for brand damage. Full autonomy, direct customer touchpoints, no guardrails where one bad conversation can undo years of relationship-building. And the case reminds us of the same dynamic we’ve seen in our LinguaLeap interviews: people forgive slow progress, but they do not forgive feeling confused, misled, or disrespected. The examples in the article show the bot already hallucinating and over-promising, which is not something you can “fix later” without losing trust.
And in regards to this, it is important to understand that waiting doesn’t mean freezing. It just means being intentional, maybe starting with an internal or draft-only version while the team figures out what level of AI actually matches their values and risk tolerance.
They also need to get clearer on what problem they’re actually solving. Reducing workload, speeding up responses, or standardizing messaging is very different from trying to replace human sales conversations and that distinction should basically decide everything: the design, the rollout, the guardrails, even the ethics of how transparent they need to be.
So my stance stays the same where I don’t think they should deploy it yet. Deploy something, but not this version. Right now it feels more like a liability dressed up as “innovation.” A thoughtful, scoped rollout would protect customer relationships, build internal confidence, and give the AI space to actually improve, and honestly, that’s worth way more than being first.
