I’ve been working in Customer Care for so many years that sometimes I genuinely forget how many.

Which is funny, because I actually started somewhere completely different: fashion design.

I quickly realised something important about myself back then. I had good taste. I could recognise beauty, coherence, balance. But I didn’t have that spark required to reinvent aesthetics or surprise the world with something radically new.

So I did what any reasonable person looking for “the future” would do at the time. I made a complete 180-degree turn and went to study analytics and programming.

And honestly? They were right. It was the future.

I still remember my final project: a pharmacy management application written in Pascal, stored on a floppy disk.

Yes. A floppy disk.

Please don’t calculate my age too precisely.

The problem was that tech startups were not exactly flourishing in Tangier back then, so life had other plans for me. And somehow, almost by accident, I found both a profession and a vocation: Customer Care.

Where it all began

I started from the beginning, as you should. A physical phone on the desk. A headset. A monitor heavier than all my dumbbells combined.

That’s where I learned the craft. Active listening. The famous “telephone smile.” How to calm frustration. How to explain technical chaos to confused human beings while trying not to become part of the chaos yourself.

Over time, I grew into leadership roles. And in many ways, that’s where the real learning began.

Because in Customer Care, we have always had to adapt ourselves to systems designed by people who have probably never handled 40 calls or tickets on a random Monday morning.

You’re in the middle of a conversation, desperately searching an internal knowledge base designed somewhere between “difficult” and “psychological warfare,” while Mrs. Dorothea asks:

“Are you still there?”

And somehow, at the same time, you are expected to follow a decision tree so enormous and absurd that it feels like a side quest in a medieval role-playing game.

I always wanted more control over those systems. The ability to simplify things. Improve them. Adapt them to reality.

Instead, you test. You verify. You gather feedback from your team. You request developments. And then you wait through three meetings, five tickets, and twenty silent prayers — just to add a comma somewhere in the process.

And then AI arrived

And suddenly, doors started opening everywhere. Change. Innovation. Simplification. Possibility.

There I was, talking to the old Bard AI about how to create a more engaging internal contest that could actually motivate people through gamification.

Then came the emails. The tutorials. The knowledge articles. The summaries. The brainstorming.

I became faster. More efficient. More productive.

And still, somehow, we remained exhausted.

Then ChatGPT appeared. Claude. Gemini. And dozens more after that.

The conversation shifted toward automation. And honestly, who wouldn’t want to eliminate absurd tasks, reduce mental noise, save time, avoid repetitive errors, or simply gain better information to make better decisions?

That part makes complete sense.

But despite all this technology, people still feel overwhelmed. Rushed. Mentally saturated. Disconnected.

The real problem

And I think the reason is simple: somewhere along the way, we started confusing human beings with machines. Or maybe more accurately — the system started treating workers like machines.

From where I stand, automation has slowly become a kind of corporate dogma. Everything revolves around efficiency. But often at the expense of clarity, meaning, human cohesion, adaptability, attention, and sustainable energy.

As I see it, AI is not here to replace human work. It is here to help us redesign work itself. To make it more sustainable. More human. More authentic. And less like an emotional assembly line.

The real value of AI is not replacing human judgement, but supporting it. Providing information in real time. Adapting processes dynamically. Building tools around reality instead of forcing humans to adapt endlessly to broken systems.

Sometimes innovation is not about creating something spectacular. Sometimes it’s simply about removing the 48 tiny manual tasks we repeat every single week for no good reason.

And maybe, just maybe, technology becomes meaningful again when it helps us reconnect — with our work, with other people, and with ourselves.