The chicken sandwich that AI wouldn't order

I got a chicken sandwich in Brooklyn last week because I asked the person behind the counter what their favourite was.

No AI agent was going to get me that sandwich. It might have found me a better-rated one, and I suspect I'd have enjoyed it less.

That's roughly what we got into at Mastercard's Personalization Pioneers summit in New York: what stays human once agents are doing the buying.

Our host put a number on the table early - three years out, how much of the buying journey gets touched by an agent? Someone said 80%. I plumped for 85. Maybe the more interesting one for your own business is how much of the journey you kept human on purpose.

A few other notes from our chat:

• People will let an agent research an engagement ring; I doubt many will let it choose one.
• An agent can rebook a cancelled flight faster than any person, though that isn't quite being looked after.
• It'll tell you that shirt looks really good on you, and you won't believe it.
• Agents take the easy volume. So what reaches a person is the exception, the complaint, the thing that broke.
• Work that used to be mostly routine becomes mostly recovery, which is the harder job, and most teams are still staffed and trained for the old mix. Recovery done well earns more loyalty than a journey that never went wrong in the first place, which makes those moments the wrong ones to trim - and most organisations will arrive at them with people trained to be adequate at volume.
• The catalogue is a game design problem too. An agent reads, it doesn't look, so you're designing for a player without eyes - and every rule you write spawns ten more, which means you get at it by playtesting rather than by specifying.

I don't know what all this does to staffing. But people remember the best bit and the last bit, and the machine's taking the middle.

P.S. I was also recommended the raspberry shortbread. They were right on that one, too.