By Dominick Miserandino, CEO, RTM Nexus
Is AI making us smarter or replacing us? I got asked that exact question recently by Tim Zawislack, and my honest answer was: yes. Both. It depends entirely on how you’re using it, and that distinction is the whole ballgame for anyone trying to figure out where AI actually fits in their business.
The test: accelerant or replacement
Here’s the line I keep coming back to. If you’re using AI to do your thinking for you, to skip the work of actually understanding something, it’s a replacement, and it will make you worse at your job over time. If you’re using it to remove the grunt work so you can spend more time on the part that actually requires a human, it’s an accelerant, and it makes you meaningfully better and faster.
The uncomfortable part of this answer is what it means for people who are only marginal at what they do. AI doesn’t fix that. It accelerates it. If you’re already good at your craft, AI strips out the day-to-day heft and lets you go tighter and broader on the parts that matter. If you’re mediocre, it just helps you produce mediocre work faster. It’s not a leveler. It’s a magnifier of whatever was already there.
The Angela story
I’ve got a good real-world example of this. I was heading into a live TV interview once, walking into the building with about three minutes to spare, when I found out a major celebrity had just died and I needed to talk about their life on air. I popped in an AirPod and called my right-hand person, Angela, and said, “I’m going to remember everything you tell me in the next three minutes.” She gave me the bio, the background, everything I needed, and I walked on set and did the interview cold. Afterward someone told me how impressive it was that I knew so much about this person off the top of my head. I hadn’t. Angela had just briefed me perfectly in three minutes.
Here’s the part that actually matters: that’s the version of this where AI should be doing Angela’s retrieval work, the Wikipedia-page assembly, the fact-gathering, so that Angela can spend her time being the thing an AI can’t be, a person who knows me well enough to read a room, catch a wrong note in my tone, or tell me honestly that something’s off. I don’t want AI replacing Angela. I want it doing the part of Angela’s job that was never the valuable part in the first place, so she can do more of what actually is.
Where this shows up in retail right now
The same split applies directly to how retailers should be thinking about AI today. I’ve used it myself to look through a call log and flag which top customers I haven’t reached out to recently, then pull three bullet points from their order history to guide the conversation. That’s AI doing something genuinely useful: setting up the script so I can be personal and specific when I actually talk to someone. The AI didn’t make the call. It made the call better by clearing the busywork out of the way first.
Where I see people get this backward is treating AI as the whole interaction instead of the setup for one. Letting a chatbot fully handle a customer relationship isn’t an accelerant, it’s a replacement, and customers can tell the difference immediately. The retailers getting real value out of AI right now are the ones using it to make their humans faster and sharper, not the ones trying to remove the humans from the equation entirely.
The part AI will never do
There’s a specific kind of value that only comes from being physically present, and no model replicates it. I once overheard a customer service call come in from someone whose name I recognized as a fairly well-known person, and nobody on the team had caught it. I had the order printed, drove it over myself, and hand-delivered it. That moment only happened because I was sitting in the room. An AI summarizing the order queue would never have caught the significance the way a human who happened to recognize a name did.
That’s the boundary worth remembering as this technology gets more capable. AI can absolutely make you faster at gathering information, drafting a script, or flagging a pattern in your data. What it can’t do is notice the thing that matters precisely because it’s out of pattern, or walk something over in person because the moment calls for it. That instinct is still entirely yours.
The bottom line
The question of whether AI makes you smarter or replaces you isn’t really a question about the technology. It’s a question about what you were already doing before you had it. Used as an accelerant on top of real skill and real attention to people, it’s one of the best tools I’ve ever had. Used as a substitute for actually understanding your customers, your craft, or your team, it just gets you to a worse outcome faster.
This piece grew out of a conversation with Tim Zawislack, available here.