Customers and growth · Founder perspective
The customer has changed.
Where has the friction gone?
When customers can find, compare and challenge information more easily, the relationship changes. The question reaches well beyond how quickly you can produce the next campaign.
The insurance story behind the question.
During a building insurance dispute, Adam used AI to work through reports and correspondence, compare accounts, identify questions and prepare material for professional advisers. Work that had felt difficult to organise became more tractable.
The experience changed the questions he could ask as a customer. He could arrive better prepared, challenge an inconsistency and make a clearer case. Professional judgement remained part of the work. AI helped him use it more effectively.
Look at the interaction from the other side.
For an organisation, the important question is what happens when a customer arrives with better information, a worked comparison or a challenge backed by evidence. Does your service help them reach a sound outcome? Or does it depend on them finding the process too difficult?
The same question applies to choosing a supplier, comparing a policy, resolving a complaint or understanding a complex offer. Do the work from the customer's position before choosing the internal process to accelerate.
Remove effort without removing trust.
Some friction is needless: repetition, opaque language, avoidable handoffs and waiting for information already available. Other checks protect a customer or improve a decision. Treat those differently.
Choose one interaction. Observe what the customer is trying to achieve, what they do now and what makes progress difficult. Test a small change with them. A useful result might be a clearer decision, a different service or fewer steps. It need not be a new AI feature.
Make this an enterprise conversation.
The CMO sees changing expectations. Sales hears the new buying questions. Operations owns the handoffs. Finance understands the economics. Legal and risk help distinguish a worthwhile simplification from a missing safeguard.
Bring those perspectives together around one customer outcome. More content is easy to produce. A better reason for the customer to choose you takes closer attention.
About this reading note
Adapted from Adam Street's The Collapsing Friction Story. This account retains the experience and its strategic question, without naming the other parties or reproducing private dispute details. It is a founder perspective, not a claim that AI replaces professional expertise.