At the company where I worked this summer, leadership began encouraging the engineering department to adopt a mentality of “vibe, then verify;” we were asked to use AI tools like Cursor to code as much as we felt comfortable doing so, but also to assume that all code is AI-generated and be appropriately detail-oriented in our reviews. At first, I thought of this as a risky move, as the company would look careless if some faulty AI-generated code got past review, but I found that the department was so used to a rigorous review process that nothing was merged without being looked over by a set of keen eyes. I don’t think this strategy would have worked as well if we had been using AI in a customer-facing domain; as Jeannie saw almost immediately, I believe it would have made our customers feel devalued and disposable compared to the personal experience of interacting with a human.
I feel pretty confident saying that in Jeannie’s case, incorporating a salesbot is a bad business decision. Even in the process of considering it as an option, word got around enough to make her biggest client’s CEO call her to express concern. PulsePoint’s profitability problem comes from their customizable content, which involves a high cost of labor, but also helps them stand out from smaller companies who use AI to reduce their production costs. By making her customers interact with a computer instead of a human, Jeannie would be failing to capitalize on what makes her company special. Instead, she should raise prices on products, with the justification that her large enterprise needs to invest in human production labor in order to keep providing a personalized product that smaller companies can’t.
If she eventually decides that she really does need to reduce costs, the internal AI tools that John and Jim described are a much better place to start. PulsePoint could use AI to prep stronger briefs for the sales team or automate some background tasks without weakening the personal relationships that built the business in the first place. Those improvements would protect the client experience rather than replace it, which seems far more aligned with the company’s identity. PulsePoint’s strength has always come from the feeling that a real person is paying attention to each client’s needs, and removing that would erase the very reason customers are willing to pay for a high-cost product at all.
