I’ve been traveling a lot lately. I don’t like being stuck in a hotel/Airbnb room, so I usually go looking for coffee shops instead, my office of the day. A good coffee, maybe a pastry, a table to get some work done, watch people come in and out. That’s the whole ritual.
While in Salt Lake City I found a place with good reviews and went to check it out. When I walked in I was a little surprised. It was an almost surgical white room, four people behind the counter, everything spotless. I was even more surprised when I got close and one of them gave me a weird look and told me I had to place my order myself, on a kiosk by the entrance, then find a table. When my order was ready they called my order number and that was it. She didn’t even look at me as she said it, even though I was the only person in there. Nothing wrong with what she did. She was doing exactly what she’d been trained to do. I didn’t think much of it, drank my coffee, got my work done, and left.
A few days later I went to a different place, and it was a very different experience. The walls were full of art, all kinds of it. Wooden tables, color everywhere, signs all over. One of the signs actually read “We do not have WiFi. Pretend it’s 1995. Talk to each other.” You order by talking to the barista, and while you do, he’s giving you recommendations, asking if you want to try different toppings, explaining the menu. I had a few questions about some of the food. What he didn’t know, he walked over to the kitchen and asked. I placed my order. They called my name, and the woman handing me my coffee actually talked to me while she did it. There was a human touch to the place. The first one didn’t have that.
Which experience would you have preferred? Which of those two places sounds more appealing to you?
For me, hands down it’s the second one. There was warmth to it. There was personality. The business felt human.
It would be easy to stop there. Warm place good, cold place bad, end of story. But I don’t think that is what actually happened, and when you think about it, there is a useful lesson hidden in there for you.
Look closer at what each place decided. The first shop saw a tool. It took orders without mistakes and saved a few minutes, so they installed it. That’s it. Efficient. Clean. And somewhere in that trade, nobody stopped to ask what the kiosk was quietly taking with it.
The second shop made a technology decision too. That “no wifi, talk like it’s 1995” sign wasn’t nostalgia, it was a choice. They understood that the thing people walked in for was each other, and they built the whole place to protect it. Same decision, opposite direction. One shop installed a tool. The other one understood itself first, then decided where the tool belonged and where it didn’t.
So it is not really tech versus human. It is understood versus checked off. One business asked what it was before it changed anything. The other one just ticked a box.
This is the part that matters right now as AI shows up at everyone’s door. AI is very good at doing things. That is not the same as knowing which things are worth doing, or which ones you should never hand off because they’re the whole reason someone chose you or your business. Lately every website I open looks like the last one. Same fonts, same layout. All that access to the same tools, and everyone arrived at the same plain beige.
So before you go embrace the new thing, stop and think it through. Ask the hard, boring question first: what is the one thing my business does that people actually come back for? Protect that with everything you have. Then put technology wherever your business actually needs it, which might be far from the thing people love, or right on top of it. What matters is that you decided, and the tool or the trend didn’t decide for you.
This might seem counterintuitive coming from someone who makes his living integrating technology, but I know technology is not a catch-all. Sometimes the right answer is the newest tool. Sometimes it is no tool at all. The whole job is knowing your business well enough to tell the difference, because the goal was never to be the most efficient coffee shop on the block. It was to be the one people go out of their way for.
