The "Automate Everything!" reflex
Automate the signal. Let the humans take action.
There’s a lot of noise right now. New tools, new capabilities, new routines, cron jobs, agents, and this low-grade fear that if you’re not automating everything, everywhere, all the time, you’re falling behind.
Got tired just writing that.
I see it in customer conversations all the time. A team goes from having almost no automation to wanting to automate everything. They make that leap before understanding what it is they’re automating.
The teams I see handling this well aren’t the ones moving fastest.
They’re the ones taking a careful, measured look at their processes. The workflows they run today and the ones they want to run tomorrow. They work through them methodically. Especially anything that touches a customer.
Automate the signal, not the action
A signal can be almost anything. An account quietly disengaging. Someone poking around your website. Support volume creeping up. Sales signals like hiring, firing, fundraising.
Automating the detection of those? Great. Those signals stay internal. Your customer never sees them unless you act on them.
And that’s where it gets dangerous. Because until you actually understand what a signal means, automating whatever comes after it is a great way to kill a relationship before it even starts.
Two examples of how this goes wrong
1. Sales signals misread as a reason to reach out.
Someone trips a signal, so you fire off an email — except you got the context wrong, and now they’re offended because you misunderstood their situation. To make it worse, everyone else pulled the same signal off the same data. So unless you’ve got something unique to add, you’re not cutting through the noise anyway.
I’ve done this.
2. Jumping to automate your best accounts.
Your tier-one, high-touch, strategic customers. You wire up workflows off sentiment analysis, ticket volume, engagement data — and because you don’t have the full picture, you may speak out of turn. You can miss an important clue or misread the room.
Different flavors, same outcome: an unhappy customer.
The problem is that there’s no air between the signal and the action. No room for error. Until you’ve tested and worked out the signal-to-action bridge and learned what the right action is for each signal, doing it at scale is reckless.
So where do the humans go?
Two ways to figure it out:
1. Start with the human.
Decide upfront where you want genuine human-to-human connection, and work back from there. What can you automate around it?
2. Start with the machine.
Map the whole process as if it were fully automated, then decide where to drop a human back in.
For high-value, strategic work, I like starting with the human. Where do I want the points of contact? The human in the loop? Then build the automation around that.
Us humans bring something that the models structurally can’t: context.
AI is getting scary good at pulling data from everywhere. But you can never be 100% sure it knows everything about a customer. A human picks up the externalities like the emotions, the offhand comments, the subtle cues none of the tooling sees.
We bring the personal touch. The quirks and the personality. All of which gets flattened and abstracted away if you tool up too fast.
I’m banging on about this because I watch it happen on repeat.
We demo Accoil and the conversation goes: “we can automate this, and that, and the next thing.” Straight from zero automation to dreaming up every workflow imaginable, then deflated when it doesn’t all happen with a snap of the fingers.
So if you take one thing from this, take the exercise:
Pick one high-value workflow — sales, onboarding, or retention.
Segment your customers down until you actually know who you’re talking to, and pull out your 20 most valuable — by revenue, lifetime value, strategic weight, whatever fits.
Then decide, deliberately: where do the human touchpoints go, and what should they be?
After that, automate the signals. Automate the tools around the human so they can do their best work.
And automate the bits in between the touchpoints, so there’s a steady, relevant cadence without your people having to do every little thing by hand.
Automate the signal. Let the humans take action.
Peter