Technology, Connected - Can AI Make Customer Service Great Again? - Brian Kenny

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

Customer service is a tricky one. It's ripe for an AI takeover, but 20 million people worldwide work in the industry, so what are the trade-offs?95% of the industry is salaries. There is a lot of collateral damage there. Millions of jobs will vanish and not everyone can be re-trained. And yet, as anyone who has experienced customer service in 2025 can testify: it's pretty lousy. Frustrating. Annoying. Expensive. And how often do your queries, questions and complaints actually get answered?In this episode of Thinking on Paper, Brian Kenny, MOMNTUM’s co-founder, explains why today’s support systems are broken, and how building from first principles with AI can actually make customer service feel human again. And the results are staggering: MOMNTUM’s AI customer service agent Laila solves 86% of cases without handoff to a humans. Early signals also flash a potential 4,000% ROI. The future of more human and successful customer service is less humans and more AI. But at what cost?You'll Learn:Why slapping bots on old workflows makes service worseHow Laila spans phone, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, and MessengerWhere AI can be trusted now and where it shouldn’t beWhat metrics really matter (hint: it’s not CSAT)The new rules of trust, disclosure, and human escalationPlease enjoy the show. --CHAPTERS(00:00) Why customer service is broken(03:30) What a modern support platform should look like(06:35) Using AI to make service feel personal(09:29) The data + privacy question(11:26) The only success metrics that really matter(15:09) Can machines create an emotional connection?(18:16) The real limits of today’s systems (and what Laila can’t do yet)(22:39) Where customer experience is headed next(34:22) What should humans be?-- Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail] more on Momntum and Laila--Thank you. We love you. Stay peaceful.

Disruptors and curious minds, welcome to thinking on paper where we explore your truth about the impact of technology on business, on culture, on humanity. I'm Mark. My co-host, Jeremy is not here today. He is on a secret mission. But rest assured, he will be next week. Regular programming will be resumed then. Until then, you have to make do with me. In exchange for your loyalty, we have an awesome guest. We have a sublime show. We're talking about customer service. We're talking about AI-powered voice. agents, we're talking about omni-channel messaging. We're talking about the hyper-personalization of every business to customer exchange. Anyone who's experienced an AI chatbot in 2025, at worst, it's infuriating. At best, it's passable, but you're helping to change that, aren't you? Brian Kenny, welcome to thinking on paper. Thank you for thinking on paper with us today.

So you've got a history, a background in multiple businesses, not all of them connected to AI, not all of them connected to customer support. What brought you here on your journey? What was your aha moment, if you like? It's a fantastic question. So I think to summarize it up, I think the biggest problem that I've noticed in customer experience or customer service at the moment is if you ring up, you know, your broadband provider or. your television provider or your bank or whatever it might be. It's always the same situation that I've encountered where it's like really long wait times. It's disconnected responses where I could be ringing maybe two or three times because I got to reiterate the same problem to a different customer service agent.

They don't know that I rang multiple times before. They got to pull up my record. And it's all so very, very transactional. Right. Like it's like kind of take a ticket, stand in line. Once we've dealt with your query, you're off my books. We hope you get your problem solved, but we've no idea. It's each kind of agent is essentially just doing their role and trying to get through as much volume as possible. And using things like CSAT score or customer satisfaction kind of tables in order to determine, have we done a great job or not. And I honestly think that, you know, in in this modern age with the amazing technology that we have, that there's such amazing potential and opportunity for building a customer experience platform from the ground up for the modern consumer. So this is essentially where momentum has stepped in. Our goal is really to leverage artificial intelligence and AI to build a strong relationship

between a business and its customer. So we've been on this mission now since January. We've had some substantial kind of breakthroughs along the way. But the goal that we've set out to do is to really strengthen that bond between the business and the customer and focus intently on lifetime value, as in customer satisfaction over long periods of time rather than transactional on the phone, deal with the query and move on style customer service. I have the impression that customer service has.

deteriorated in the current age of AI, as bad as it was when it was just speaking to a human over the phone. At least you felt like you were getting somewhere. You have the experience now isn't better on the whole. It feels more truncated. It feels slower. It feels like your problems aren't really being resolved. You raise such a good point, which is, you know, with the evolution of AI, it seems like everybody is deploying these solutions, but we're getting nowhere. And this is mainly going backwards.

And like driving people crazy. And it's mainly around this idea where it's like an iterative approach, as in this is how customer service is right now. And then we take the block of AI and we stick it on top and then we cross our fingers and we hope for the best. And I truly believe that that's just not going to get us to where we need to be. So there's really fundamental things that we've done from the ground up as we build it completely for the modern consumer from the ground up. Number one, we got to be on every communication medium. So currently Leila, which is our AI agent, you know, she's on phone calls.

She's on Instagram direct messages. She's on Facebook Messenger. She's on WhatsApp. She's on every communication medium that the modern consumer is. But then doing really simple. But true Omnichannel, like doing a really simplistic thing, which is when you ring Leila and if a conversation, so first of all, Laila will recognize you straight away if you're a customer there and say, hey, Brian, and know everything about previous calls and, you know, your records and what you might be talking about during that interaction.

But then secondly, really helping to figure out how is the customer feeling on this call. So if the call goes on longer than, let's say, two minutes or three minutes or what Lela would deem as taking too long, You just say something really simple. Like, if you want, this call is going on a bit too long, we can just continue on WhatsApp because you've got other stuff that you've got to deal with. If you want, hang up the call and I'll send you a WhatsApp, but we can continue the conversation there. And there's all of these really, I would say simple ideas,

but modern consumer experience ideas that puts the customer first and builds that bond together with the customer and the business. Chat, GBT, GBT 5 has just come out. Everyone's experimenting it, see where it's weak, sees where it's strong. So thinking on paper, we'd like to use the AI to curate all our episodes. We have transcripts for 200, over 200 shows, different guests across the different domain, put them all into an open. I know we shouldn't be doing now. We should be using a decentralized AI platform on site, but, you know, we do. And one of the things I find continuously,

when you have that much data, that many shows, it gets confused between the shows. It can't keep track. It can't separate. It mixes up the guests. It mixes up the top. when you ask it to join the dots between show 50 and show 75, it can't do that. How is your relationship, I think you call it a relationship language model solving that problem? If you have all these different customers and it can identify their past histories, how is that how is your model working to make sure that it's picking the right person, it's getting the right history? Yeah.

So we've noticed that too. we've noticed with even really large context windows, the larger the information set that you give to one of these frontier LLMs, the more Jenga Tower wonky, the kind of the response comes back. So what you don't want to do is to have a large thread and then try to just continually add more and more to this thread with one of these external models. So what we've really tried to keep as proprietary as possible is, first of all, we're completely privacy focused first. So with any of the advancements that we make within our ORLM or anything around emotional intelligence, we want to really protect privacy and the responsibility that we have in building technology in AI. So a big part of this is you can think of momentum almost like it's, own box. Now within this box, we have, you know, the regular kind of data silos, the business,

the business is customers, information on customer records, CRM style attributes, purchases, all of these things. And then on top of that, we have our ORLM, our relationship language model that really gets to know who the person is that they're speaking with. And that's overlaid against what the business is trying to achieve, as in who is. Is the business, is a coffee shop? Is it a beauty spa? Is it a hairdresser? These types of things.

And then when a conversation starts, we essentially only leverage external LLMs, you know, like the llamas, the open AIs, the anthropics, in order to process parts of a conversation. So we're kind of going out and back, but we have really specific agreements with the frontier models to say, first of all, you can't train any of your models based on the data that we set.

end. And then second of all, when we open a thread, leverage one of the LLMs and I come back, we dispose of that thread and they must completely delete all of this data from their servers. So it keeps all of the proprietary tech and the relationship or the emotional and intelligent part of Leila within our silo. And it's really required for hearts of our customer base and things like that too. But it also circumnavigates this large context, just trod over the fence to a frontier model cross your fingers and hope for the best. So kind of moving away from that wrapper mentality, but more into what is the best way of dealing with the conversation that's at hand. That's really interesting. And I guess from a, when a business or when you approach a business or

when they approach you, the trust of their customers is paramount. And if they can be assured that customer data is not being used to train the language models of the big megatech AI companies, they can sleep easier at night. And their customers can sleep easier. and I'm knowing that, if I understand that correctly. Yeah, and it's so important. I mean, in certain cases, you know, the best way of describing how we'll use an external or third-party LLM is really, you know, we're not going to develop our own LLM at that scale because we don't have tens of billions of dollars in order to do that.

However, what we do have is custody of knowing that we're going to build a relationship between the customer and the business. And there's a lot of fiduciary responsibility that comes with that. We want to really make sure that we have solid guardrails in place. You alluded to this even at the very beginning, which is there's nothing worse than a customer service agent, be it human or AI, who can't actually solve the problem for you. So that means that Leila. Yeah, exactly.

So for example, Leila, we won't take on a business unless we have the capability of interfacing with our client's back end or technology or something, as in if it's a restaurant booking, we want access to that booking system. If it's a home security system, we want access to place some leads or sales into their CRM. Otherwise, it's kind of this whole thing where you're interacting with a boss and you're going blah, blah, blah,

and the bot says, I'll have somebody come back to you and it's just the worst experience ever. Can you give a percentage or a number currently of how successful Layla is with resolving different queries versus and being having to hand it off. Is there any data on how successful it is at the moment on that?

What I want to do is be as transparent about this figure as possible. So we're currently hitting about an 86% success rate, which is mind blowing compared to some of the statistics that are out there in the market right now. But how is this number derived

and offering as much transparency around that as possible? We have the capability within Leila that if a customer of a business, business says, I want to talk to a human. In that case, Leila will create what's called a support request and then the company is notified and they can get in contact with that customer. If we took 100 conversations and one support request was created, then that would be a 99% success rate for ourselves, as in Leila has handled 99 out of 100. And that's the metric where

we're getting to 86% from at the moment. What sort of contact types is that, is that on, is that on? Where's my order or can I book a table or you overcharged me, undercharged me, I want my money back, like what kind of interaction is it solving at 86%? The first one that we kind of, the business that we landed is in the medical spa space. So kind of Botox, lip fillers, aesthetic treatments and things like this. So you can just what Jeremy needs when he comes back next week. Well, we'll put him a contact. for sure. But you can imagine the complexity of booking an appointment within there. First of all,

this client has multiple clinics, clinics in the UK, in Ireland and in the US as well. So first of all, we have the multilingual aspect, as in a lot of the Miami-based clinics will all speak Spanish. And so Leila speaks direct Spanish to every customer there, which is just unlocked substantial potential. Number two is the requirement that the potential customer might have, as in what does it feel like? What is the service, you know, do I go in for a consultation and then what's the follow-on treatments from there? And there's all the complexities around some of these treatments. But Leila fluidly helps all of those customers in an emotional way to navigate all the questions

that they have and then to book appointments, cancel appointments, reschedule them, tell the clinic that they're running late. Pretty much all of the things that you could imagine a person on the phone within the clinic would have to deal with. And now it's gotten to a point where for that business, see, is the number one salesperson within the company. And they think of her like an actual person, which is phenomenal. And we also on the customer side have people talking to Layla and saying,

can I please know who your manager is? Because I'd love to write like a glowing recommendation about the service that you're providing. It's just this mind-blowing stuff that really is kind of shock us of how powerful the emotional stuff is. Even one where a lady rang up because she needed to cancel her appointment because her dog had gotten ill. But Leila obviously, you know, cancels the appointment and says, I hope your dog is okay, etc. The lady rings back in about a couple of months. And the first thing Leila says is, how is your dog? And it's just this whole way where, you know, an amazing bond is built between the customer and,

and the business through the like sublena. Are people being starved of conversation, human contact? There's this big narrative about social media is not social, that people have destroyed all their links to actual real life conversation. And people don't listen to each other. Everyone's just waiting to talk and speak about themselves. And this just idea of even if it's just an AI listening, it almost feels like a big part of this is the AI listens.

And just when someone listens, you feel needed, and wanted and special and that's why they want to write glowing reviews for you because yeah, someone listened to me for once. It's so true. Like,

do you think the real reason, like when I really think about it is we dug into the economics of the whole situation and it turns out that any growing business there comes like this inflection point where it no longer becomes economically viable to keep customer servants in-house.

And so we look for, external solutions like contact centers, different pieces of software, all these different things to manage it. And we decide, like, it's got to be possible to fit that on its head where if somebody who was passionate opened a coffee shop tomorrow, they'd be so proud of their coffee shop and they'd know every customer that's a repeat customer and say, hey, Brian, you want your filter coffee like normal, hope all as well, has momentum going, etc. That should be like the status quo for large enterprise customer service, like an internet relationship

between you and the business and for them to really know and value who you are as a single customer. The anti-starbucks, their tagline could be whatever the name of the cafe is. We don't need to write your name on a cup because we know your name. It could work.

Seven hundred languages I read. Is that correct? Layla can speak 700 languages? Yeah, we did this crazy experiment as well where in that med spa, actually, There's lots of different colleagues who speak languages from Greek to Spanish to German and all, everything in between. We did a little kind of video where all of the different colleagues that could speak different languages were raining up and asking Layla questions. And, you know, she kind of nails it out of the park every time.

Really difficult to test when you don't speak multiple languages. But a phenomenal experience when a customer gets to speak in. the language that they are in. Accents, regional dialect, slang, swearing, any issues there? Emotional awareness is probably the biggest one where, you know, if I say, hey, I'm Brian versus, hey, I'm Brian. Like, and there's all of these different ways that you can say the same thing in a different context.

And then there is the regurgitation of that emotional response back. And this is where all of our proprietary tech comes in the most. If somebody is upset about a, a situation, it's embracing that. It's trying to ensure that the person feels heard and understood rather than feeling like they're talking to a robot. So within the context, knowing where RLM interjects different emotional aspects to how to say the sentence

is really important. Also, like, to use of emojis and other different kind of gatches. Yeah, you need emojis for the young people, don't you? And for the LinkedIn crowd. Where does Lela fail? What is she, I said she, where does it? Where does Lela fail? What is it not good at at the moment? It's really a question of what is she not ready for? There's certain situations where you really want to ensure that the potentiality of hallucinations or anything not going completely 100% correct isn't brought into the mix. So for instance, bank transfers or medical records or any of these types of, of things, anything where she's going to interact with something that has a really high risk factor.

I just don't think that it's not necessarily even a momentum problem. It's a AI at large and a responsible problem where we need to, you know, kind of watch as the evolution of this technology increases to see when is the right time to test on certain things. Even similar, like the, you know, Tesla's testing their autonomous driving and all of this. There's so much rules. and regulations and stuff that we really need to be diligent about and that there's certain cases that it's just not ready for there yet. Understood. Okay, well, let's do a thinking on paper thought experiment

because I really like the idea of somebody coming to the Thinking on Paper website, thinking on paper. XYZ for all our shows and book club episodes, and having a pop-up of me or Jeremy modeled on our mannerisms and our accent and our humor interacting with visitors to our website. Let's take it a little bit further for the businesses and brands listening to this.

Okay. And then we have a range of merchandise which we sell on the back end of the websites, t-shirts, hats. We organize events, that kind of thing. Walk us through how we and by that. Others would incorporate Layla or some momentum product into that amazing website

which I'd made myself on Elementor and WordPress. For sure. So I think, yeah. So like our target customer or ICP is really anything that's eye customer touch and really strongly powered by technology. So think about airlines, car rental, restaurants, booking hotels, all of these types of things that is a, you know, it's a really kind of a fluid conversation that tends to have and I'm looking for this restaurant at this time. So there's there's all of that. But in order to get up and running with momentum and to deploy it on, let's say, the thinking on paper website, it's first of all just getting your account set up. It's connecting it to Elementor or to whatever your e-commerce platform is,

even going back to, let's say, the coffee shop scenario. And then there would be a little chat widget on the website. There would be a WhatsApp number. We'd provide you with all of the kind of phone numbers where everything is ready. You can connect in your Instagram, you can connect in your Facebook, and then we can train Leila on exactly what we'd like her to publish. So as people start interacting, they might say, I'm really interested in some fruity coffee beans or whatever it might be. And Leila will look through all of the e-commerce elements and products that are available and say, yeah, let's get some coffee beans and a hat and whatever it might be.

Here's a cart. And even if you have, let's say, an e-commerce store, plus you have a restaurant booking engine, she'll transact across both of those at the same time, which creates one single transaction, but reconciles it in different areas. So you're up and running relatively quickly. She'll train on all of the information that you give her.

But the real power comes when I go back and say, the fruity beans were lovely, but I'd love something that is a little bit more toned down. And she'll know all of my buying history and know how I felt about the last beans and whatever it might be and recommend some other products that are within your e-commerce store to try out or even if you have subscriptions and things like that as well. It's the hyper-personalisation of the internet, of the buying experience,

of the brand customer experience that we've spoken about this while I'm thinking on paper, this hyper-personalise. So the brand, you can personalise the brand voice, you can personalise the brand voice to every individual and create an individual experience. We've spoken about momentum, we've spoken about Laila. I want to talk about what comes next. And maybe if this is your personal views on this,

how you see things evolving, agenic AI, crypto payments. How will Laila fit in, or how do you envisage it fitting into this agentic web where, in fact, there are no humans in the loop except to the customer? Leila is very customer-focused at the moment. However, on the back end, in the dashboards that we have for the business owner, it's all very tables and reports and charts and everything. You can see, for example, different cohorts of customers who are falling out of love or there isn't a strong relationship with the business.

However, what we're playing with at the moment is a Leila but for the business side where Leila can interact. So you can imagine the business owner in his or her car driving towards the office. rings up Leila and Leila's walking through all of the customer interactions that she had yesterday. Some customers really love this or I had this challenge that happened to me yesterday. Some of the customers in Miami really struggled with X, Y or Z or whatever it might be. And I've also noticed, Brian, that there's these 10 customers who are starting to fall out of, you know, a high relationship status with your business. What I'd recommend is that I write like a tailored offer to each one of those individual people based on the connection, the relationship that I have with these people to say, you know, Brian, come back in for your regular appointment and we're going to add in an extra treatment on the house or whatever it might be.

So she'll write external outbound sides of messages to strengthen bonds that she's seeing dip off, but also to really bring business owners, up to speed on how the customers are feeling about their business in phone calls, in WhatsApp, in whatever way that they would love as well. Before we get into the big, deep philosophical questions on this, any data on the ROI, the return, like how much money this can is, would, could save, make businesses? Yeah, so at the moment, it's, I don't know, if we price it wrong, whatever money, or we're tracking at a 4,000%

return and investment. So this is, I think Leila is doing over a million euros in bookings, you know, in revenue generation for our clients every two months at the moment. And, you know, we only started in January. I think we're on track to hit six or seven million in revenue for our businesses at the moment. And then of that, the way that momentum charges our clients is, number one, an active customers, so how many active customers you have in momentum. them every 30 days.

And number two, how many times Layla does something? As in, if she's booked an appointment, canceled an appointment, or taken an action on behalf of your customers, will charge for that also. So it's a usage-based pricing model that's going in there.

But the aura is being insane. Will it do social media? Will it act as a social media manager as well? We haven't figured that out fully yet. Okay. Thank you, Brian. So in a minute, we'll be asking the Kevin Kelly follow over question. Before we get into this, so a recent Deloitte survey found that employee resistance is one of the top barriers to AI adoption, although on the same hand, on the same

token as that, 65% of companies are using AI in 24, 25. And I think that's probably an underestimate. Gardner says 10% of all agent interactions will be automated by next year, 2026. 17 million customer service agents in the world, maybe more, maybe less, probably more. How do you approach and how should the AI industry at large address this pushback, address this problem? Like what do you say to the customer service agents who are listening to this saying, oh, don't but that's my job, that's why I do. It's such an amazing tool. It's so profound in its capabilities and what we can do because of it. To the point that the revolution that happened when we got computers at our fingertips is happening even again, but stronger and deeper.

And we need to embrace that. It isn't about, you know, pausing time for how it stands right now and saying, okay, what is the impact that it's going to have on the current workforce, but more looking at it as an evolutionary step where what is the current workforce now capable of doing by leveraging this phenomenal tool that's at our fingertips. And I think once we lean further into creativity and imagination and what humans are just substantially amazing at doing, it unlocks doors and potential of where we can go in the future. So we should embrace and as a parent get our kids to study it, to use it, to try, this is about educating the populace. We're talking about pivoting, changing, augmenting.

We speak a lot about augmentation of skills, augmentation of our abilities. I think there's always a fear initially. And to be honest, I'm probably one of the most laggard technology adopters that's out there in a way because I don't want to change things too drastically too quickly. And it took me a while to really jump on the AI bandwagon. But now I have an 11-year-old and an 8-year-old and they've both got full chat GPT subscription Lidie, my eldest, has this strange concern about school where she's asked to do something,

whether she's allowed to use chat GPT to ask questions and to research and things like that. In our house, it is absolutely the way to go. And to now to a point where she's starting to, you know, we went on holidays recently and she'll ask chat GPT, how should I pack my buys? I want to write me out a checklist and try to help me to not forget things. And so it's amazing to see once people have leaned further into what this technology can unlock and where it can bring them and what, you know, what kind of bandwidth they can leverage their mind over to chat TPT rather than being too worried about, well, first of all, where are we going

to go and what's the, you know, the fear side of it. I think we do need to be responsible about it. I think it's really important that we get some sort of regulation around AI at some point in the future and that we really help to, I wouldn't say curtail, but push some sort of responsible attitude on commercial innovation moving maybe a little bit too quickly. Like if you had your open AIs, anthropics and all of the people who are really pushing to go fast that we get to AGI, releasing models on a really fast cadence. and it becomes a commercial land grab question rather than a responsible one, then I would like to see kind of regulation placed around that and responsibility

placed around that too. What would you like to look like? Would that be a global AI strike force? Would it be country by country? How would you think that would work best? I don't know is my answer at the moment. I mean, I've been keeping up to date on the EU AI Act and what's going on in the US and some of the other aspects that are coming.

out. In a way, some regulation can curtail commercial viability and speed in what we can do with the technology. But it's a really, it's a tough problem to solve. But I think we'll get there. I've always seen the world as more of a global one, and of which, you know, as amazing as different countries can be. I think we're all global citizens. And I think AI in a way is a testament to that, that we need to figure this out as humans, as we say, in order to really double down on where it can bring us in the future. Can I ask you a personal question? So you might be able to help me on this.

So my daughter's not quite as old as yours. And she is a, she loves drawing like a lot of kids. She draws her own cartoons, animations. She draws still live. Any excuse she gets, she'll draw. And she hasn't used AI yet. and my initial thought would be that an image generator would be the best place to start. But then I think if I give her the keys to that, will that stop her drawing or will that

encourage her to draw something different? It's a big battle in my head about whether to give her the keys to this or not. And have you noticed any change in how they create? I think it's such a valid really, really strong points that a lot of people really need to to think about at the moment, which is how much of your creativity and imagination are you handing over to an LLM in order and completely willing to take the LLM's output and call it? You know, that's the way that I'm going to go. I think that that's completely something that we need to be very cognizant and aware of.

Stifling creativity is something that I would completely push against. And so when it comes to mass knowledge search and summarization capabilities within AI to see things that you can't potentially see right now, to jog the memory to really understand and understand what's possible. AI is phenomenal at doing it. You can't ask it to do your homework. You need to understand what it's responding

and you need to have the competency to take it in, learn it, ask questions about it and understand it. And if there's concepts in there that you don't understand, then you can ask it to, you know, bring it down a few levels, you know, teach me like I'm a Labrador type of thing or whatever it might be. I think it's phenomenal when you lean into it as a self-improvement or self-educational tool. But handing over your, you know, fiduciary or kind of your responsibilities or your question

or your work to it and saying, just go do it and I'll see you later is not right path. You can see this with a lot of kind of coding at the moment where we call it vibe coding. But, you know, if it's returning all of this code and you're not sense checking what it is or making sure that it's adding it in the right spot or it's the correct interpretation of what you wanted, then it's not the right path. You're going to end up with this whole spaghetti code based that isn't where you need it to be. So a great tool, a great addition, but it doesn't substitute for your daughter's creativity, your drawing is your, you know, you're kind of tying you to be creative. Wonderful answer. Thank you. Brian. Thank you for

thinking on paper with us. I think you've left our audience with a lot of questions, some great ideas, any businesses, brands looking at this and wanting to update or upgrade or think about how AI is used in their workflow. I think you've given them some good ideas as well. I appreciate your time. I've got one last thing for the disruptors and curious minds out there. We've got a book club at thinking on paper where we read books slowly about technology and the impact. At the moment, we're reading Empire of AI by Karen Ho, Dreams and Nightmares, Sam Altman's Open AI. Previous books include Nexus, Yuval No Harari,

The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman, Irreducible Federico Fasgin. You can check all those out at thinkingonpaper.xyZ. We record those live. So if you are reading Empire of AI, check out the website. You can join us. And on that, Brian, so Kevin Kelly left us a question that we now ask all our guests at the end of thinking on paper. What should humans be and how does technology help us get there?

I think humans should be. explorers and adventures and continually challenging and pushing themselves to go further. And technology is probably one of the biggest aids in doing that. It unlocks rooms that we've never been in. It creates potential discoveries that we've never even known existed. And it constantly challenges us to get to the next role in the ladder. I meet that with excitement. Meet that with I wonder where we're going to be 10, 20, 100, 100, a thousand years. And as we grow as a species, bracing technology to be the aids in allowing us to discover more

and not allowing, but empowering us to discover more, is such a wonderful thing to have. And I'm excited to be alive right now. I love that analogy of unlocking rooms that we've never been in and then stepping into that room and letting your brain, your imagination, see what's there. love that. Thank you. Do you have a question that you'd like to leave for future guests of thinking on paper that we can add to our canon of questions? Yeah, I mean, not thought about too deeply,

but I would say one question that I've often tried to noodle over myself is really should an AI agent acknowledge themselves or introduce themselves as an AI before you interact with them. No, is my off-the-cuff answer to that. I think that personally, long term. So does that mean in 100 years, in a thousand years, if we're still around, that you're having a conversation, the first thing they say is, oh, by the way, I'm not human. Although, maybe they should. I don't know, actually. Maybe I've changed my mind straight away. It's crazy. Like, it's a, the EU AI Act is now saying that, you know, we should, or it's something that they're fighting for to be a part of the act, that the, whenever you open up

the live chat or WhatsApp or whatever, that it should say, hi, I'm Leila, an AI assistant. And however, I don't know if that's the correct path. I mean, from, we'd even shied away in momentum from, you know, an AI kind of listing out bullet points of information because a human would never do that. Like, if you're looking for slots, it's going to be written in a text and sometimes poorly formatted and everything else. And I think we wanted to be as human-like experience as possible. But it does leave us with this question of should Lela always introduce yourself?

as an AI or, which is our current path or current situation, whenever you ask Layla, is she an AI? She'll of course say yes. Let us know in the comments wherever you are consuming this podcast, YouTube, Spotify, Apple. Let us know in the comments. Should they just come out with it straight away? I am Layla. I'm an AI agent.

Or should they not? Let us know. And on that note, I would say, thank you, Brian. Be disruptive. Be serious. Keep thinking on paper. And we'll see you next week when Jomu will be back in the house. without Botox, with news of his secret mission.

Thank you very much. Thank you.