Article
You remember the moment a product or service surprised you. Not because it was efficient, but because it made you feel something. AI has never felt that moment.
Long before AI entered our design process, we had already started designing for the wrong human.
In service design, we’ve built language around people: human-centred design, customer journeys, empathy maps, personas. And yet somewhere along the way we started designing for the functional human. The one who clicks and converts, not the one who feels something while doing it. We got very good at mapping behaviour and less good at asking how an experience actually feels.
The numbers suggest that we’re not alone. PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey found that nine out of ten executives believe customer loyalty has grown in recent years. Only four in ten consumers say the same thing. That’s not just a perception gap; it’s a blind spot. It’s the kind you develop when you keep measuring what an experience does and stop asking what it feels like.
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
– Maya Angelou, Writer & Poet
I came back to the tech industry from building brands, and I’ve watched “brand” become a misunderstood word in service design: something for the marketing department, applied on top once the real work is done. I think that’s backwards. For most customers, the experience is the brand, and it’s where they feel it. I wrote about the same pattern in loyalty recently, and the conclusion was identical: the emotional relationship drives the number that matters.
Marcus Buckingham’s article in Harvard Business Review sharpened this for me and made me a little uncomfortable. His research shows that the relationship between an experience and what people do afterwards isn’t a straight line. Mildly positive experiences don’t change behaviour. Behaviour changes when an experience gets close to love. And his prescription isn’t more data or better technology. It’s to understand what your biggest fans feel. Not what they do, what they love.
Which brings me to AI.
What AI can’t do
AI can analyse sentiment, predict behaviour and personalise at a scale no human team could. It is incredible at improving what already exists, at lifting 2 to 3. But it optimises toward the expected. In a study published in Science Advances, writers were given AI-generated story ideas. The individual stories written without AI became more creative, yet the stories written with AI resembled each other more than those written without it. Better on average, narrower overall.
The five-out-of-five experience almost always comes from a person deciding to break the pattern. Think about unboxing an iPhone. The lid lifts slowly, longer than strictly necessary. I’d bet someone in Apple’s finance team has tried to cut that cost more than once. Yet it made opening a box into a ritual of anticipation. A spreadsheet wouldn’t have started there, because it makes no logical sense. Feelings usually don’t.
And before we blame the machines: the silent rage of a chatbot loop that won’t let you reach a human. The “your call is important to us” message on minute fourteen. AI didn’t invent those. People designed them, people who had stopped asking how it feels on the other end. We were optimising the feeling out of experiences long before AI arrived. AI just made it faster to execute.
Three questions that help me get back on ‘a human level’
I haven’t cracked this, and this piece is partly a note to myself. But these three questions have helped.
1. Who are your biggest fans, and what do they feel that others don’t? The signal isn’t in the average. It’s in the people who love what you do better than anyone else. You don’t find them by staring at dashboards full of data points. You go to them, sit with them, and try to feel what they feel. That kind of empathy isn’t a research method, it’s a mindset. So be curious.
2. What should this feel like before we decide what it should do? Start from the emotional outcome, not the functional one. If you can’t describe the feeling you’re designing toward, maybe you’re not ready to design yet.
3. Where does this experience need to surprise? I personally love weird experiences, and the best experiences leave room for a moment nobody saw coming. That moment is a human decision to break the expected pattern, and it needs protecting from the pressure to optimise everything into sameness.
Time is only a gift if someone defends it
This is not an anti-AI piece. I use AI every day and I believe in what it makes possible. As it takes over more of the execution layer, we should have more time than ever to focus on the part that matters: asking not just “does this work?” but “does this feel like anything worth remembering?”
But that time isn’t automatically a gift. Freed-up time is also a saving, and someone in a finance team is already calculating it. So, the last question isn’t about technology at all: who will defend the moment that has no business case, but that the customer will remember and value?
AI has never once felt anything. The experiences worth building will still be made by the people who have.
Written by
Jesse Pitkänen is a Principal Consultant of Strategy & Experience at Nitor who used to make brands beautiful and now makes them digital. He still thinks most tech decisions are secretly brand decisions. He works at Nitor helping companies figure that out.
