Tag: Cory Doctorow

Seeking help to harness AI in a busy, growing business

AI tolls on handset

We hit Easter ready for a break, though I’m still working from my parents’ house in Broad Haven.

I’m immensely pleased with progress at Distinctive over the last year, while feeling intensely busy as the team continues its growth spurt.

We’re hiring again, in response to client requests to provide new services. We’re constantly learning and investing in training, tech and additional support to help us to work better.

It’s a challenging time, but there’s plenty to celebrate every day. Clients value what we do. Our work makes a positive difference and is turning heads. And we’re recognised as a good employer at a time when inclusive practice is under pressure.

But when you’re busy and keen to move forward, it’s often the small things that get in the way. Considered in isolation, they seem a manageable cost of doing business. Taken together, day by day, they add up to a lot.

Hello, bad tech. A constant irritant and frequent roadblock to getting things done. While we’ve hit on some areas with AI that help us, I regularly rub against the same frustrations with tools that make me question the hype around it.

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Your call is not important to us: how ‘efficiency’ kills good service

Unsatisfied customer holding frown icon on wooden circle. Conceptual representation of customer satisfaction evaluation, depicting bad service, negative review, and low score.

“We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.”

Cory Doctorow on the decline of tech services in the FT earlier this year

I return to comments like this while processing a constant frustration nagging at me since setting up Distinctive in 2022.

Not the biggest challenge, for sure. Working through disruption caused by the mini budget was more severe. Moving office at short notice just before last Christmas more stressful.

But it’s ever-present, and hiding in plain sight. A barrier to progress, sapping energy, and draining my sense of humour. All made worse by the feeling that it shouldn’t happen at all. But it does anyway.

A post from O2, extolling the virtues of it customer service.

I’m referring to days of precious time wasted trying and failing to contact big organisations – banks, public bodies, utility companies and tech providers.

All say they are there to help. Some sell their services on a promise of simplifying customers’ lives, while making any contact with them complicated, arduous and slow.

They lie. These empty pledges mask a painful reality of badly designed tech that blocks meaningful human contact. This is laid bare in the recent UK Customer Satisfaction Index by the Institute of Customer Service, which found satisfaction levels at their lowest level since 2010.

It’s what writer Cory Doctorow’s ‘great enshittening’ describes; a process of decline in services we rely on, as companies chase efficiency and leave customers wrestling with clunkiness at their own cost.

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