Dave Hersh, a local entrepreneur I respect, wrote something that’s been stuck in my head: “AI and automation are forcing a change. Companies must be more human to survive, as there won’t be much else to stand on when all else is equal.”

We run a domain registrar. For years, competitive advantage came from technical execution and approach. We made transfers easy – even outgoing ones. You need your auth code, we just give it to you. Clean interface. And trying to inject a bit of fun into every interaction – leaving customers feeling great about accomplishing their goals vs. frustrated.

AI is about to change what technical excellence means. Not because it makes the work less important – but because it’s going to raise the baseline. What used to be a competitive advantage becomes the entry fee. Every registrar will be highly functional and have clean interfaces. You’ll need excellent technology just to be in the game.

So what becomes the differentiator when everyone has great tech?

The stuff that can’t be automated.

The customer panicking at midnight because their site is down and they need someone who actually cares. The judgment call about whether to help someone recover a domain they forgot to renew. The person choosing you because you don’t feel like a faceless corporation treating them like a ticket number.

Our 4.8 Trustpilot rating isn’t really about our technology. It’s about people trusting that we’ll treat them like humans.

The obvious move is using AI to handle routine questions so real people can focus on situations that actually need human judgment. But here’s what keeps occurring to me: AI might make human service more valuable, not less. When every company can automate perfectly, authentic human interaction becomes rare.

The companies that figure out where to stay human will have something competitors can’t easily copy. The ones that automate everything will blend together.

I don’t know exactly what this looks like yet. But I’m pretty sure we’re entering a period where the hardest question won’t be “what can we automate?” It’ll be “what should we keep human?”