Better Proposals is a Human-Only Company

I shouldn’t have to write this. This isn’t the battle I should be fighting, but I don’t give a fuck if it’s my last fight. I’m going down swinging. It’s that important.

Maybe I’m alone in this, but business to me is the ultimate test of creativity. Yes, pure art is creative, but nothing balances it. It’s just about the creation process and the output. Does it look nice? Yes. Then it’s art and it’s your art and it’s great. No questions asked.

Stock trading is the opposite end of that spectrum. Pure facts, figures, and raw data. No time and space for art here. It’s unapologetically raw and has a simple output that doesn’t care about anything else. Did it produce profit? That’s the only marker.

Business doesn't work that way

But business is something different. It was always that balance. Be creative, but you need to be profitable too or you go out of business. Yes, produce profit, but you’ve got to do it in a creative way. Sometimes it’s 99% driving that balance sheet. Other times, it’s 99% creativity, art, problem solving, making things.

But it’s never 100%. 

That balance needs to be there or the equilibrium is fucked. I love that. It’s what makes this the greatest game ever created and it’s that balance that creates the different characters you meet in your business journey. One minute you’ll be talking to someone blindly obsessed with something they’re creating, often at the expense of their social cues. The next, you’ll be having a conversation with an emotionless brute trying to extract every last 0.00001% out of a landing page. 

Both are great people. 

You can learn from both. 

You need both.

The world needs both.

All AI has done is try its best to remove that creativity or redirect it and the whole concept of it misses the point. It’s steeped in productivity, getting more done in less time. But the question I’m asking, and I’m sure others will soon is: “What’s the point?”

And that’s exactly the problem, which is why Better Proposals is making the commitment to fight AI. 

I don’t mean fight the robots like Will Smith does. I mean, do it the hard way, the human way. I’ll give you some examples.

Content marketing powered by human intelligence

There are tools that allow you to create something in ChatGPT, then chuck the output through various content spinners to “de-AI” it. Google can’t detect that a human didn't write it, and therefore it will rank. Great, except anyone with two brain cells to rub together can tell a human didn't write it because it’s complete shit. 

Our promise is that we will never use AI tools to create content. Everything you read from us has been researched and written, copy edited for readability and impact. You don’t want to read shit any more than we want to create it. We got you.

Customer support (this is the big one)

We use Intercom. It’s great for a lot of things, but the last few years, all they’ve done is pump out these bots and I flatly refused to use any of it. I fucking hate the idea of tricking someone into thinking they’re talking to a person when they’re actually talking to a computer. It’s shitty.

Then, recently, they came out with a bunch of ChatGPT hacks that speed up customer support. Some look genuinely quite useful. They have a “summarise” feature that reads the chat and produces a summary. Quite useful if you need to escalate something to a senior but keep the information internal - except, they’re presenting it as a summary to the customer.

Fuck that! 

No way am I having my support team sending bullshit from ChatGPT to our customers. 

Look, the whole point of customer support is to help your customers, deeply understand their issues, and get them from their A to their B. That is NEVER described the same way twice, so you can’t use predictive text algorithms to work that out because these things can’t do empathy.

“Hey, I’m trying to change my logo but I can’t find where to do it, can you help?”

Is very different to 

“I have wasted 2 hours on this thing, how the hell do you change the god damn logo?! This is seriously winding me up!”

Both have asked how to change the logo, but the context couldn’t be more different. You can tell me that AI will eventually figure this out, but it won’t. It doesn’t understand the pain that guy in the second example is going through.

We go through a lot of pain to ensure every single customer gets a human reply, 24 hours a day, often within 90 seconds. Not only that, but everyone is trained to handle every single scenario - no getting passed around. That is something we’re incredibly proud of and we do it without the help of any AI tools. It’s just good old fashioned typing fast, reacting quickly, and knowing your product ridiculously well. 

Final thoughts on artificial intelligence

As long as there’s a choice, we will always have as much of this business operated by humans only. I am ready to leave profit on the table if it means providing a superior service. And by superior, I mean one provided by one of our customer support team. 

I would encourage you to do the same. Can you join the fight against the slippery slope that is automated customer support, automated “creativity”, and a world that is riddled with artificially created nonsense? 

I hope you can, and I hope you can support our effort to be real, be human, and not take the easy way out in a world where almost everyone else will. 

I love you. 

I can say that because I’m a human.

Adam