You're one chatbot away from losing your best customers
Here's when you should not automate...
Hey team,
Over the last few weeks, an open-source project called OpenClaw blew up, hitting millions of downloads. It is an AI agent you run 24x7 on your computer that writes code, books flights, handles email, and plugs into WhatsApp, Slack, and Telegram.
Folks are running their life through it. Building websites from their phones, fixing bugs overnight, and letting it operate continuously without being prompted for each task.
The future is coming really quickly, but what does it mean for CX?
It’s likely that in a near-future state, most customer interactions will be handled by automation. Your customer’s AI assistant talks to your brand’s AI assistant. Orders are placed, shipments are tracked, and issues are resolved without a human involved.
When that becomes the default, the moments when a human steps in become the entire experience.
Right now, brands think premium CX is about polished unboxing and a handwritten note, but customers judge you on whether someone stepped in at the right moment and fixed their issue without friction.
And ironically, automation is not the risk. Blind automation is.
I learned this at Jones Road. A customer ordered the wrong foundation shade and emailed us immediately to request a change before it shipped. The email came in on Friday at 6 pm.
By Monday, when support saw it and offered the right shade, the customer had waited all weekend for a 30-second fix.
This could have been solved in a second with the right automation, but not everything should be automated.
And when you do automate, you need a partner that truly gets how to build your AI teammates, not slop.
This week, let’s talk about building proper automation (this week’s partner truly gets it) and when (and where) human touch will actually deeply matter.
Excited for you to read this one, I wrote it from the heart with a bit of sass. 😏
This week’s newsie is brought to you by KODIF AI.
As your brand scales, customer conversations explode across support, pre-purchase, and every corner of your site. The question becomes: do you build a larger team, or a smarter one?
The AI CX market is crowded, but here are a few reasons KODIF stands apart from what I’ve seen:
1️⃣ Built for complexity — not just basic FAQ.
From what I’ve seen other AI agents break when SOPs get multi-system and conditional. KODIF asks you to give them your most complex SOP, and automate that.
For example, I saw how KODIF chat agent handled Aura Frames complex troubleshooting product issues end-to-end — walking a customer through diagnostic steps and, if needed, triggering a replacement part order inside the same flow. I was impressed.
2️⃣ An AI CX team > one AI Agent
They build AI CX Team, purpose - specialized agents that mirror CX roles: an AI Support Agent for resolution, AI Concierge for pre-purchase and conversion, AI Analyst for insights, and AI Manager for continuous improvement. It’s a team model, not a catch-all model.
3️⃣ Deep ecommerce integrations (not surface-level)
They’ve built 178+ ecommerce integrations and shipped 88 new ones in 2025 alone.
You all know that matters because automation only works when the system can actually take action, not just answer questions.
Some recent cool reviews on the success stories:
“The customizability of KODIF is what excites me most. I’m in there every day. Containment is great and all, but quality matters just as much or more. Our automation rate is above 70% but more importantly we are leveraging KODIF for retention.”
— Jack Dukesherer, Sr. Manager, Member Engagement Ops
“The Chat AI Agent can walk someone through calibrating their grinder — it’s super resourceful with the right inputs. Furthermore, address changes and cancellations? Completely automated. I haven’t thought about a cancellation in ages.”
— Cindy Rodriguez, Director of CX
“We started with deflection as the goal, but it turned into more — now the AI helps customers discover products, understand ingredients, and convert. That’s real ROI.”
Cristina Fucchi, Chief Customer Officer
Something that stood out to me is their founders’ strong engineering background. Their CTO, Norm, previously built Uber’s customer support automation platform, automating 150 million customer requests per month.
KODIF is trusted by top ecommerce brands such as True Classic, Ruggable, Dollar Shave Club, Liquid I.V., One Skin, Aura Frames, Fellow, Neuro, Who Gives a Crap, Million Dollar Baby, Ivy City, Helix Sleep and many others.
Many teams review their CX stack in Q1, and if your support workflows are complex, it might be worth a conversation with Chyngyz and the KODIF team to see if it’s a fit. They promise to go live in 3-5 days.
Also, they are offering my readers 3-months for free… Just hit up their team and drop my name, Eli Weiss. This offer is valid only through March 31, 2026.
When automation exposes what is missing
I checked into a Hyatt House in London last year. There was not a single human at the front desk. You scanned your ID at a machine, opted in or out of late checkout, and the machine printed a room key.
My introvert self appreciated the efficiency. But once I settled in, it became obvious that I could have stayed at a hostel for half the price if there was going to be zero hospitality. I paid Hyatt rates for a vending-machine experience.
The automation worked fine. What it did was make the missing piece impossible to ignore.
When everything gets handled by a machine, the absence of a human becomes the experience.
This is where a lot of brands are headed without fully thinking it through. They automate everything they can, which is often the right move, but they never stop to ask what happens in the rare moments when a human is still involved.
We are already seeing the backlash. OpenAI is reportedly working on a social network for humans only, where users would need to verify they are actually human, potentially through biometric checks.
We are moving so fast toward automation that we are already building walls to protect spaces for real human interaction.
That tells you everything you need to know about where this is going. Bots will be the default. Human interaction will become the premium feature.
At Jones Road, we automated a meaningful portion of customer support. Bots handled order tracking, basic product questions, and simple troubleshooting. That freed the team up to focus on harder problems.
The Power of Moments:
But we also built tripwires. Signals that told us when the bot was no longer helping and a human needed to step in. That’s the tactical version. The strategic version looks different.
Hotels like Ritz-Carlton have really nailed the idea of knowing where to step in.
I was talking to a friend, Izzy, CEO of Portless, about his recent trip to China and his stay at the Ritz there.
He had a mango every morning for breakfast, and one day he came down and asked for his daily mango.
They said that, unfortunately, all the local markets were out. He had a sad face. The next morning he came down and there was a beautiful mango sitting on the plate. They had traveled 45 minutes to get it.
What I love about this story is that if they just gave a random person this mango, it would mean nothing. They deeply understood the mango moment: what that moment meant for him and when they needed to jump in and do something special.
Every brand has a mango moment. The question is whether you’ve identified yours.
Five signals that a human needs to step in
1. When the conversation goes in circles
If someone asks the same question three different ways, the bot is not understanding. Premium brands catch that loop and route the conversation to a human before frustration sets in.
Most brands let the bot keep trying. The customer repeats themselves four or five times, gives up, and leaves believing your support is useless.
At OLIPOP, we had a simple rule. If the bot responded three times and the customer was still asking, a human took over. Not because the bot was bad, but because the customer clearly needed something it could not provide.
2. When emotion shows up in the message
All caps. Multiple question marks. Words like frustrated, disappointed, or angry. Bots can detect sentiment, and premium brands use that signal to escalate early.
Most brands either ignore the signal or train the bot to respond with canned empathy. That makes things worse. Nobody wants a bot apologizing for frustration when the bot is the source of it.
If someone is upset, get a human involved. A bot is not going to calm them down.
3. When someone explicitly asks for a human
This should be obvious, but most brands still make you work for it. They redirect you back to the bot. They ask if the bot can help first. They make you prove you deserve a person.
Premium brands just connect you. If someone asks for a human, give them one. Making customers justify that request is the opposite of premium.
4. When real money is involved
A $15 order issue can be handled by a bot. A $500 order that went missing should not be.
Most brands set automated thresholds based on cost savings, not customer impact. Bots handle refunds and replacements up to an arbitrary number that looks good on a spreadsheet and terrible in real life.
Premium brands understand that when someone is out real money, a human should be making judgment calls. Not because the bot would necessarily get it wrong, but because the customer deserves to feel like someone is actually evaluating their situation.
5. When someone has earned it
Your best customers should not have to prove they deserve human attention. Premium brands automatically route long-term or high-value customers to people.
If someone has been buying from you for three years, they should not be explaining a problem to a bot. They earned a shortcut.
Most brands treat everyone the same. That is efficient. It is also how you lose your best customers to a brand that recognizes them.
We are sprinting toward a future where bots handle most of the work. That is fine, and probably good.
The brands that win will be the ones that understand when to turn the bot off.
Premium is not about automating everything. It is about knowing when a human matters and never making people beg for one.
That’s it for this week!
Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?
Just shoot me a DM or an email!
Cheers,
Eli 💛
P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.
