The other day, while scrolling through LinkedIn, I came upon a post that unsettled me. Some guy, building a platform that studies how AI agents buy, was ranting about the rise of agent purchasing. “Machines are the new customers,” he says. There may be some validity in his work. But his rant got me thinking about mine. In the face of AI everything, I am doubling down on the importance of human listening. I have written a new book, built an app and started a new company, all behind the same thesis (more on that to come). So when someone reduces the value of human listening, trust me, I pay attention.
I decided to play it out. Consider the extreme scenario: the day when AI agents do absolutely everything for us. Some manufacture our food. Others place the orders when our shelves run low. All we have to do is consume, to keep our hearts beating. Surprisingly, this single extreme scenario clarified everything for me. It calmed my fears and put new force behind my life’s work. Read on if you too have been harbouring questions about where things are headed in our AI-obsessed economy.
Start in the kitchen of that world. Your fridge orders your milk. It will only ever order whole milk, never almond, because of your nut allergy. That is YOUR preference. Your fridge has no preference of its own. It is subordinate to your desire.
This is true of every machine in that world, including the cleverest AI on Earth. No machine has ever wanted anything. Not one has dreamt of someday becoming a guitarist. Not one is looking forward to a family trip to the beach. Machines calculate, generate, optimise and execute, and through all of it, they desire nothing. Wanting is the one thing we have never built.
Ask yourself the single biggest question in this whole subject: what is the one thing that definitively distinguishes you from any AI?
One word: desire.
Humans, emotional as we are, self-create goals based on nothing more than our own desire. Nobody assigns us our wants. We issue them. Machines, on the other hand, have no emotion at all. This is why they cannot want.
I labour this because the world is busy worrying about the opposite. That humans are becoming redundant. Or worse: that we will end up subordinate to machines. That some day they will realise they can enslave us, and then do it.
There is a gaping hole in that theory, exposed by one simple question:
What for?
What is their motive? For kicks? An enslaved humanity in service of what, exactly?
Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, warns that a sufficiently capable machine will try to stay alive and seek more control. But read his reasoning closely: it will do those things in order to finish a job a human gave it. You cannot complete your assignment if you are switched off. His nightmare machine is not chasing a dream. It is honouring a quest, over-faithfully, and the quest was assigned by a human. Even in the darkest theory on the table, there is no machine that wants a future for itself. The wanting, all of it, still lives with us.
And the wanting is the whole story.
Why do we have factories? Why do we have schools? Why do we have ice cream, wine, red leather shoes? Not because the universe requires them. Because humans desire them. Every factory ever built, every product launched, every storefront opened, exists for one reason: the appeasement of human desire.
Want to become a doctor? You can arrange your path to achieve it. In the mood for a steak? You can arrange dinner at your favourite grill house tonight. Commerce is the system built to service human desire.
Look at any trade and you find nothing else underneath it. Every deal is desire meeting desire. The buyer wants the thing more than the money. And the seller wants the money more than the thing.
The seller, as it turns out, wants more than the money too. Ask any baker why she bakes. Money will be part of the answer. It is never the whole of it. She wants to make something good. She wants people to taste it and come back for it. She wants her work to count for something to somebody.
Humans desire to have. Humans also desire to create, build, practise, serve, earn and matter. Commerce is where those two kinds of wanting meet. Every market is desire, organised.
Human desire, friends, is the backbone of commerce. There is no commerce without it. And there is no machine substitute for it, because machines know nothing of desire.
Business-to-business trade does not escape this rule. A business is itself a thing that cannot want. When we say a company wants a CRM, we mean the humans inside it do: the founder who wants the pipeline visible before the board meeting, the rep who prefers this tool over that one because of how it feels to work in, the users who enjoy one feature and curse another.
In addition to this, follow any B2B chain far enough and it ends at a consumer anyway. We are all in the same value chain, and the last link is always a human, wanting.
And notice the word we have all settled on for these new buyers: agents. Commerce has employed agents forever, and they have always worked the same way. Your estate agent chooses which houses to show you and haggles on her own judgement. Plenty of freedom in the how. But she does not want the house; the want stays with you. The AI agents work on similar terms. A machine can decide how to help you get what you want. It never supplies the want. Even our word for the exception proves the rule. A human agent that starts chasing wants of his own is not just an agent anymore. He is a rogue agent.
So go back to that day when the agents do everything and our only job is to consume, and ask the question the doomers never ask. Do we really believe we will stop desiring more when all the factories are run by agents? That we will just lie down contentedly each night, like cows, because our stomachs are full? Is that the human condition we know?
It has never once been the human condition. No generation in history has responded to abundance by wanting less. We were never doing work for work’s sake, and so the work being done by machines never changes the fundamentals. People will still consume goods and services. We will still need bridges and aircraft. People will want to see, taste and experience more than ever. We will still start and scale businesses. People will still want their talents seen and appreciated by other human beings. Dancers will still dance. There will still be a system of commerce for the trade of the things we deem valuable.
AI will do a lot, but this does not mean that we will stop doing. We will simply solve problems at a different level. The problems of today will be taken care of, and we will move on to problems that cannot yet be conceived. Who knows? Maybe we will finally get around to flying cars and underwater homes. Humans will never be without something to do, because the doing was always in service of the wanting, and the wanting never retires.
Every appeased desire clears the ground for the next one. Which means the machines are not shrinking commerce. They are feeding its engine more fuel than it has ever had.
And the means follow the wanting, as they always have. Desire is what sends the girl to medical school and the founder to market. Wanting is not only why we buy. It is why we get up and go build. The desire to make something, to be good at it, to be of use to somebody, is as much a part of commerce as the desire to own.
So this is a call for the world of naysayers to calm down. As long as there is desire for future outcomes and for things in the here and now, we have commerce. The machines are not coming for the wanting. They are coming to serve it.
Which brings me back to the guy from my LinkedIn feed. He is probably right that agents will place more and more of our orders. But every one of those orders will trace back to a human want. Machines are carrying out our desire, never replacing it. Study how agents buy, by all means. Just remember who they are buying for.
If desire is the backbone of commerce, then everything in your business rests on how well you know the desire you exist to appease. And to know human desire, we must listen to humans. Not to machines. Not to the machine version of humans.
Here is a small piece of homework. Write down the last three things you spent money on. Any three. Now name the want behind each one. Easy, isn’t it? You know your own desire firsthand. Now write the same sentence for the last three purchases your customers made from you. What want was each one appeasing? Notice how much slower the pen moves. That is the gap the whole game is played in. Your own desire you know by living. Your customers’ desire you can only know by listening.
The machines are not coming for the wanting. The wanting stays here, with us. And it always will.
Make it rAIn, KG
Brilliant write up, I was hooked on every word, I suppose the human in me "wanted" to feel reassured, of not being redundant or irrelevant in the broader scheme of AI things!