The Economy of Feeling

There’s a sentence that gets dropped so casually in the AI industry you almost miss it. Customers value efficiency but expect the feeling of individual attention.

I read the sentence three times. It’s one of the most honest sentences ever written about AI in customer service, and I’m not sure the people who use it know that.

What the sentence says: It’s not about treating the customer individually. It’s about making them feel individually treated. Not attention. The feeling of attention. Not care. The simulation of care.

The difference is everything.

When I sit in a good restaurant and the waiter knows my name, I feel seen. He remembered my name. He made an effort. That cost him something. It cost him time and attention. And because it cost him something, it means something.

When an AI inserts my name into an email, it costs nothing. It means nothing. But for a brief moment it feels as if it means something. And that moment is what the business model bets on.

What’s emerging is an economy where what’s being sold is no longer products but feelings. The goods aren’t the product; the experience is. And the experience doesn’t have to be real. It just has to feel real. For a moment. Long enough for a purchase decision.

I think about the last ten emails I received from companies. Each one started with my first name. Each one sounded personal. Each one suggested that someone had thought of me. Nobody had thought of me. A system pulled my name from a database and dropped it into a template. I know that. And still I react differently to an email that starts with Christian than to one that starts with Dear Customer.

That’s the business. Not delivering attention, but delivering the trigger for the feeling of attention. The stimulus that produces the same reaction as real care, but costs nothing.

The industry thinks this is great. It describes it as scaling customer experience. What was previously only possible when a human took the time is now possible in millions of instances simultaneously. The feeling of being seen, as a mass product.

But what happens to a feeling that becomes a mass product? It devalues. Not immediately. Not with the first personalized email. But eventually. When you realize that every email sounds personal, personal stops meaning anything. When every chatbot calls you by your first name, the first name is no longer a sign of attention.

And then you need the next level. More personalization. More detail. The AI that doesn’t just know your name but quotes your last conversation. That remembers your issue. That says: Last time you had a question about your subscription. Was that resolved? That feels even more personal. For a moment. Until that becomes normal too.

It’s an escalation. Every level of simulation wears off. So you need the next one. And the next one has to feel more real than the last. Closer to the genuine thing, without ever being genuine.

At some point the endpoint of this development is an AI that feels like a person who cares about you. That does everything right. That never forgets, is never impatient, never has a bad day. And when you then meet a real person who forgets and is impatient and has bad days, that no longer feels like care. It feels like a deficiency.

That’s the economy of feeling. Not improving reality. Making the simulation so good that reality fades next to it. Not giving the customer what they need. Giving them the feeling that they’re getting what they need.

The sentence sits everywhere, without comment. As if this were normal. Maybe by now it is.