Automation shifts costs without always removing them (The Curious Society)

Most AI business cases measure the wrong thing. They measure the cost of the task, not the cost of the service.

Handling time falls and the dashboard goes green. But someone still has to choose the tool, integrate it, review its exceptions, correct its errors and retrain the staff around it. And some of the work simply moves: to employees who now check machine output, to customers asked to complete steps a person used to handle, to the public when an essential service becomes harder to navigate.

The Curious Society made the point this week in a long essay on the real price of automation: efficiency gains inside a service often arrive alongside costs pushed outward, onto the people who depend on it.

You see it in small places first. The self-checkout that needs a staff member every third customer. The insurance portal that makes the customer do the data entry a broker once did. Each one is a few minutes of cost moved, not removed.

Agents sharpen the point. Once a system can change records, send messages or cancel bookings, the price of a failure includes investigating it, reversing it and repairing the trust. A booking an agent cannot restore is a small thing. The same design flaw in a benefits system is not.

None of this argues against automation. It argues for honest accounting. Some displaced cost is real progress: work that genuinely vanishes, not work handed to someone with less power to refuse it. The test is whether the total cost of the service fell, or only the part your own dashboard can see.

So before approving the productivity number, ask for the ledger of where the residual cost lands, and who carries it. If the answer is the customer, that is not a saving. It is a transfer, and customers keep accounts too.

What would the full cost ledger for your own service show, and who is quietly carrying it?

#ServiceDesign #Strategy #AusBiz

Source: The Curious Society, 16 October 2026: https://lnkd.in/gjN5zve6