AI: The new competitive advantage may be humanity
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become part of everyday life. We use it to write emails, summarize meetings, improve presentations, tailor CVs, answer customer questions, brainstorm ideas, and speed up research. Work that once took hours can now be completed in minutes. Smaller teams can compete effectively with larger organizations. Information is more accessible than ever before. Standards have risen almost overnight.
And yet, alongside all of this progress, something strange is emerging.
While everything is becoming more polished and optimized, it’s also becoming more uniform.
The internet feels flatter.
Customer interactions are faster but often less memorable. We are entering a world where everyone has access to the same tools, the same intelligence, and the same ability to refine their work. The question is no longer whether AI improves quality? Clearly, it does. In a recruitment context, the real question is what happens when everyone becomes equally good at using it to present the optimum versions of themselves?
That was one of the most interesting themes that emerged during a recent conversation with Brendan Ring, Chief People Officer at Otonomee. Throughout the discussion, Ring repeatedly returned to one word in particular: sameness.
“We all use some AI in our day-to-day,” he says. “We see the value in it. The challenge is there’s a sameness about almost everything.”
The digital world is expanding — but what happens to the analog one?
It is not a criticism of AI itself. In fact, Ring is clear that people should be using these tools. The concern lies in the way many of us have started interacting with them. Instead of using AI to sharpen our own thinking, there is a growing tendency to let it do the thinking for us.
“You should be giving your strong opinion to AI and it should help you tease it out,” Ring explains. “I think what many people are doing is asking about X and taking direction from AI. So their opinion is being made for them.”
That distinction feels increasingly important. AI can be an extraordinarily powerful tool when used to challenge ideas, expose weaknesses, or help structure thoughts more clearly. The danger appears when people begin with no perspective at all and rely entirely on AI to generate one. Ring worries about where that trend could lead over time.
“If you play that out for two or three years, no one is going to have an opinion.”
Sameness is perhaps most visible in online spaces like LinkedIn. Platforms that once felt full of individual voices and perspectives now often feel strangely repetitive. Posts are polished, articulate, and grammatically perfect, but increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another.
“LinkedIn was my number one go-to resource every day,” Ring says. “Now, I very rarely log in because when I see posts, I see AI.”
There is an irony in this.
The very tools designed to help us communicate more effectively may also be sanding down the rough edges that made people interesting in the first place. Human communication has always been imperfect. Personality often lives in those imperfections and in the human journey to find answers. It appears in unconventional phrasing, unusual perspectives, emotional nuance, and the small inconsistencies that reveal genuine thought.
Recruitment has entered the age of the perfect CV
This becomes even more complicated in recruitment, where AI has fundamentally changed how candidates present themselves. CVs can now be tailored to specific job descriptions in seconds.
Candidates are using AI to strengthen language, improve structure, and better align their experience with the role they are applying for.
From one perspective, this is a positive development. It gives more people the ability to present themselves confidently and professionally. From another perspective, it makes it increasingly difficult to identify genuine talent.
The result is that recruiters are now reviewing hundreds of highly polished applications that all appear equally impressive on paper.
In many ways, AI has levelled the playing field.
Candidates with less experience are now able to present themselves with the same professionalism as more experienced applicants. Ring points out that this has brought people closer together in terms of presentation and perceived capability.
This creates a fascinating challenge for hiring teams.
If CVs no longer provide the same level of distinction they once did, businesses may need to rely more heavily on qualities that are far more difficult to automate. Ring believes recruitment may begin shifting back toward deeper human assessment.
“It’s taking a turn to going back and meeting people and understanding their personalities,” he says. “Who are they? What are their values? Are they coachable? Do they want to be here?”
AI in customer experience: fast, efficient… and emotionally flat?
That shift toward human connection is not limited to recruitment.
It is also becoming increasingly visible in customer experience.
AI-powered customer support systems are everywhere, and more recently, in many situations, they work remarkably well. Customers receive answers quickly, businesses operate more efficiently, and simple issues are resolved almost instantly.
But efficiency does not always create a positive experience.
Ring describes a recent interaction with a chatbot that trapped him in an endless loop while trying to resolve a more complicated issue.
“My issue was really important for me at that moment in time, but I was getting the exact same treatment as somebody who was asking a very simple question.”
That frustration points toward one of the central tensions in AI-driven customer service.
Standardization improves consistency, but people do not always want to feel standardized.
Customers want efficiency, but they crave empathy, flexibility, and recognition when situations become more nuanced or emotional.
“Now everyone has chat and emails and a standard approach to how to answer them,” Ring says. “So, how do you make a customer feel special? How do you provide great service?”
This may explain why many businesses are seeing a renewed appreciation for human interaction. For years, digital transformation focused heavily on moving customers toward automated channels. Now it is evident that growing numbers of people simply want to speak to another person for non-trivial support.
“Customers now want more phone calls because email, chat, and bots have become too frustratingly anonymous,” Ring says.
That observation leads to one of the most thought-provoking ideas from the conversation.
“We need to standardize what's invisible, but not what's visible.”
In other words, AI is powerful when it operates behind the scenes.
It can streamline processes, eliminate repetitive work, improve accuracy, and increase speed. It can have a role in ‘front of house’ also but many companies are getting this wrong.
The human-facing experience still needs to feel personal, flexible, and emotionally intelligent. Customer experience personalization is what makes the difference. Businesses that over-standardize customer interactions risk creating experiences that are technically efficient but emotionally hollow.
The same questions are now emerging in business development and RFP processes. AI has dramatically improved the ability of companies to research prospects, analyze competitors, identify gaps, and produce high-quality proposals quickly. Smaller companies now have access to capabilities that previously belonged only to larger organizations.
This creates opportunity, but also a dilemma. If every company can produce excellent proposals using the same AI tools, how do customers decide between them?
The new competitive advantage may be humanity
This may ultimately become one of the defining questions of the AI era. If technology raises the quality of everything, then quality alone stops being the differentiator.
Human relationships, trust, creativity, judgement, and personality begin to matter even more.
The ethical question nobody has answered
Perhaps the most important part of the discussion was not about productivity or business transformation at all. It was about ethics. Ring points out how quickly society has normalized the use of AI in almost every aspect of work and communication.
“Someone who maybe felt guilty running their CV through AI a year ago is now being encouraged in their job to put everything through AI.”
The boundaries have shifted remarkably quickly.
Activities that once felt questionable are now expected.
AI usage has gone from experimental to standard practice in a very short period of time. Yet despite this rapid adoption, very few people seem to be asking where the limits should actually be.
“The big question is: Where should we not use it?” Ring asks. “Because right now, there's nowhere where you shouldn't.”
Individuals will continue using AI because it makes life easier and work faster. The challenge now is ensuring that convenience does not replace originality, judgement, personality, and human connection in the process.
It's a question that sits at the heart of what premium customer experience looks like today.
Perhaps the future is not about choosing between the digital world and the analog one. Perhaps it is about deciding which parts of ourselves should never become fully automated.
About Brendan Ring
As Chief People Officer of Otonomee since 2021, with over 10 years of experience in Leadership roles within the industry, Ring was an integral part of a Leadership Team that scaled Voxpro to 6000 across the US, Europe, and Asia. He has supported the growth of some of the most iconic brands in the industry, thanks to his wealth of experience in acquisitions, geographic expansions, employee engagement, scaling, culture, and leadership.
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