Old School AI wins every time!!!

THE ROBOTS STILL CAN’T CLOSE

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud in the middle of all this AI hype: the most powerful technology you have isn’t sitting in a browser tab.

It’s you.

Matt Abrahams published a piece in Fast Company today that I genuinely couldn’t agree with more, and I want to build on it because I think it cuts even deeper than the headline suggests. His argument, shaped by years teaching strategic communication at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and coaching executives, is this: in an era where AI is handling more and more of the administrative and analytical work, the two skills that will truly separate people are Authenticity and Influence. Old School AI, as he calls it. 

Yeah. For sure. A thousand times yes.

And I want to add something to that, because I live this every single day.

I run an agency that connects enterprise buyers to digital solutions companies. No retainer. No handoffs. Just relationships, pattern recognition, and the ability to walk into a conversation and make somebody feel like the most important person in the room. That is the whole business model. And I can tell you with complete conviction that no LLM is coming for that any time soon.

Abrahams makes the point that AI can mimic caring. It can generate a polished memo or a tidy three-bullet summary in seconds. But it cannot show up in the room the way humans do. It cannot lean in and show genuine empathy when a colleague seems uncertain. It cannot pivot when a conversation takes an unexpected turn. It cannot pick up on the meaning behind the words, sensing confusion, doubt, excitement, or fear. 

That’s not a small gap. That’s the whole game.

I think about it like this. Every buyer I’ve ever worked with, every CIO or CHRO I’ve ever placed or partnered with, every founder I’ve signed, the moment they decided to trust me wasn’t because I had the most polished pitch deck. It was because they felt, in some real and specific way, that I actually understood what they were dealing with. That I’d done the homework. That I genuinely cared how it went for them.

You cannot automate that. You can approximate it, sure, and it’s getting better. But right now we are deep in what Abrahams calls the “uncanny valley” with AI agents still lacking in humanness, and that gap is where humans find their foothold.  The research on persuasion, as he notes, is pretty consistent on this: people trust people.

And so the question I keep coming back to isn’t “what will AI replace?” That conversation is everywhere and it’s mostly a distraction. The more interesting question, the one Abrahams keeps raising with his students and the people he coaches, is: what will AI reveal? 

What it reveals, I think, is who actually built the muscle. Who put in the reps on the relational stuff. Who learned to read a room, sit with ambiguity, ask the right follow-up question, and make someone feel genuinely heard. Because all of that is now a competitive advantage in a way it has never been before, and a lot of people are going to find out they coasted on process when what the moment actually requires is presence.

Abrahams uses a great example from the 1992 presidential debates. When asked about how the economy affected them personally, George H.W. Bush came off as distant and robotic. Bill Clinton moved toward the audience member, asked a clarifying question, shared a personal anecdote, and ended with a clear call to action. Clinton’s authenticity won over the room.  And ultimately, as we know, a lot more than just that room.

That wasn’t a communications strategy. That was a person who understood that facts and figures were less important in that moment than vulnerability and shared emotion. You either have that instinct or you’re working to develop it. Either way, now is the time.

I’m also big on the structural piece Abrahams lays out. His favourite framework is simple: What? So What? Now What? Lead with the idea, anchor it in why it matters to your audience specifically, then move them to action.  I’ve been doing a version of this my whole career without ever putting a name to it, and it works because it treats the person across from you as someone whose time and attention is valuable enough to earn. Not to fill.

At the end of the day, I think the people who are going to thrive in whatever comes next are the ones who doubled down on the irreplaceable stuff instead of freaking out about the replaceable stuff. Be more human. Be more present. Be more real.

The robots are fast and they’re getting smarter every day. But they still can’t close.

And that’s still everything.

Hat tip to Matt Abrahams for the original piece in Fast Company. Worth the full read: fastcompany.com