The Delegation Dial: Knowing When AI Should (and Shouldn’t) Take the Wheel

I love asking audiences this question: Would you rather talk to a human or a bot?

Everybody says human. Every. Single. Time. And then I challenge them. “Do you want to have to talk to a person to make an airline reservation?” “Would you rather talk to a human if it meant you could only do it between the hours of 9-5 with a break from 12-1 for lunch?” The hands start to drop.

Back in my student days, I worked the phones at a Hyatt reservations center. (Fun fact: Omaha was the home of telemarketing in the 90s, thanks to our smooth accents and inoffensive time zone … lol) Anyway, picture it … rows and rows of us, headsets on, scripts in front of us, saying “I’m so sorry about the hold, how can I help you today?” roughly four thousand times a shift. Reserve a room. Cancel a reservation. Send me a receipt. Reserve a room. Cancel a reservation. Send me a receipt. I’m not going to lie, there were stretches where I could have easily been replaced by a parrot with a booking system, let alone a bot.

Now flip that around. This still happens today … I’m sitting at home biting my nails waiting on medical test results for my mom, and what do I get? An email that says, “Your results are now available. Please log in to the patient portal to view.” The patient portal where I can’t remember my password. And naturally, it’s after hours. Nobody is picking up the phone. And now I’m spiraling and staring at a “reset password” screen like it personally offended me.

Same me in both scenarios. Wildly different emotional stakes. And that, in my experience, is the part most organizations aren’t digging deep enough in their quest for automations. They’re making the “human or bot” decision based on what’s cheapest or fastest, not based on where their customer actually is emotionally.

Everyone’s Automating. Few Are Thinking About It.

McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report found that 88% of organizations are using AI in at least one function. Sounds like progress, right? Except only 6% qualify as high performers actually seeing meaningful financial impact. That’s a lot of organizations spending money on AI without getting much back, and a good chunk of that might be because they’re automating and AI’ing the wrong things.

A Zendesk global survey tells the same story from the customer side. 52% of consumers are comfortable with AI handling everyday tasks. But when something goes wrong financially, 58% immediately want a human.

People aren’t anti-AI. They’re anti-AI-in-the-wrong-moment.

Introducing the Delegation Dial

Most people treat this like a binary: automate or don’t. But perhaps think about it as a dial, not a switch. I call it the Delegation Dial.

On one end: mechanical. Low emotional investment, routine, transactional. People want speed.

On the other: meaningful. High emotional investment, complex, relationship-driven. People want connection.

The mistake? Treating everything like it’s at the same point on the dial.

Password resets, appointment reminders, booking confirmations? Nobody wants a personal phone call. They want it done. Now. And the research agrees, 62% of people actually prefer chatbots for simple requests. When emotional investment is low, speed and convenience ARE the experience.

My patient portal meltdown? That’s the other end. I wasn’t looking for efficiency. I needed someone who understood I was scared. And 86% of customers agree, empathy matters more than speed.

When emotional stakes are low, speed is the experience. When emotional stakes are high, connection is.

Where We Get This Wrong (and Right)

Let’s take sales as an example. Cold outreach? Top-of-funnel prospecting? That’s solid mechanical territory, a volume play where AI can identify prospects, personalize touchpoints, and qualify interest. Now, mechanical doesn’t mean sloppy or impersonal. In fact, our ability to use AI to make those outreaches more personalized and more relevant is one of the biggest wins in this space right now. Being on the mechanical end of the dial isn’t about doing a subpar job. It’s about deploying the right resource for the moment.

But renewals? Negotiations? Those unexpected moments when a client says, “We’re thinking about going in a different direction”? Those are meaningful. Those require a human who can listen, read the room, and respond with genuine care.

Keep in mind that there’s a lot of nuance here because the dial moves. The same client who was fine with an automated reminder last month might need a human conversation today because their business is under pressure. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll automate a moment that needed a human touch.

The Land of a 1000 Dials

Our experiences with a brand are complex and constantly changing based on internal and external factors. Over the years, I’ve done dozens of customer journey maps that, when done from the clients’ perspective, feel like a roller coaster. Each twist and turn, up and down, moment of conversation and day of silence is a different dial.

But the benefits of going through an exercise like this are massive. Not only can you identify friction points where AI can smooth out a process, but you can hopefully spot opportunities where you should be leaning even more into that human connection moment.

Reading the Dial: Three Questions

Before you automate any interaction, here is a task and 3 questions you can start with:

Task: Map their journey (customers, prospects, employees, partners, whoever!). This will give you a solid foundation and a real picture of what’s happening at a moment in time, as well as before and after that moment. Here’s a link to my Customer Journey Prompt, this will help with this process (you’re welcome!).

Questions:

• How emotionally invested is this person at this stage of the process or in this moment?
• What happens to trust (and our brand reputation) if we get this wrong?
• Would they rather have this resolved in 10 seconds, or feel heard for 10 minutes?

Hybrid AI-human models boost customer satisfaction by 12 to 27% compared to either approach alone. It’s really not about choosing but rather placing each one where they do their best work.

AI doesn’t need to do everything. It needs to do the right things, so your people can do the things that actually matter.

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Your Homework

Map your customer touchpoints against the Delegation Dial this week. Where are you wasting human talent on mechanical moments a bot could handle in seconds (and deliver faster results for your clients/customers)? And where are you automating meaningful moments and quietly eroding trust?

Fix those first. This is an ongoing project for my business, and the opportunities and clarity we are gaining have certainly surprised us.

Most importantly, be open to injecting human-ness into even those seemingly AI moments. Remember my Hyatt headset? One of my favorite memories was a couple who called in, clearly stretching their budget for a romantic getaway. They were so hopeful and so careful with every dollar, and I managed to find them a honeymoon suite, complete with strawberries and champagne, on a special rate they didn’t even know existed. I could hear them celebrating on the other end of the line. That call was good for me as a human as much as it was for them. No bot in the world could have read the excitement in their voices and understood what it meant to them.

That’s the meaningful end of the dial. And it’s worth protecting.

If that sounds like a conversation worth having for your team or your next event, I’d love to help. Drop me a note and let’s talk about it.