The Signal #008 — Dakota’s read on the AI news that actually matters to people running a business.

A writer named Shawn Smucker published something on Substack in early May that got passed around a lot. Not a product review. Not a benchmark. A poem, basically, written in the voice of sarcasm.

It opened 10,083 likes and 279 comments. That’s a lot of people nodding.

Worth reading slowly if you run a business. Not because it tells you to stop using AI. It doesn’t. But because it names something real that most operator conversations skip right over.

What happened

Smucker’s piece, “Please Use AI”, is written as a string of instructions dripping with irony. Use AI for your meal plan, he says, so you don’t have to call your friend who cooks and accidentally hear about her father’s cancer diagnosis or what she planted in her spring garden. Use AI to plan a camping trip, so you don’t end up texting your buddy all day and meeting him for a late beer where he tells you he’s been ending nights blackout drunk.

Use AI to write your kid’s wedding toast, he says, because “no one wants to hear your words, the actual poorly written words of a parent who changed hundreds of diapers.”

Then he closes the whole thing sitting still, his youngest daughter asleep on his chest, his arm going numb because he won’t move and risk the moment.

One of the top comments is from a reader whose grandmother is basically blind and whose grandfather is basically deaf. She called them for a peanut butter pie recipe anyway. Her grandfather read the recipe card over the phone while the grandmother shouted corrections in the background. She made the pie exactly as it was shouted to her. “It’s lovely,” she wrote. “Lovelier for the way it was given, and not sourced.”

That comment got a lot of replies too.

Why it matters for an operator

You are not a poet. You run trucks, or you manage crews, or you answer phones at 6 AM because a pipe burst somewhere and a homeowner is panicking. The sentimental case Smucker makes is not directly about your business.

But here is the indirect version, and it is very directly about your business.

AI is genuinely useful for the repeatable, low-stakes, information-retrieval parts of your operation. Drafting a follow-up text. Summarizing a long email thread. Pulling together a job estimate template. Answering “what hours are you open” at midnight when your office is dark. That work is real, and automating it is a reasonable decision.

The problem is that some operators, once they see how fast AI moves, start reaching for it in places where speed is not the point. They use it to write every customer-facing message, including the ones that actually needed a human voice. They use it to plan every team meeting agenda, including the one where someone on the crew has been struggling and needed to be asked a real question. They let it handle every difficult conversation by proxy, because difficult conversations are inefficient.

Smucker’s essay is a warning about what you lose when efficiency becomes the only value you optimize for.

What most people get wrong

Most people read something like this and land in one of two ditches.

Ditch one: “AI is soulless and I should use it less.” That’s not the lesson. AI writing your dispatch confirmations does not cost you anything human. No one’s life is made smaller because a bot sent a reminder text.

Ditch two: “This is just sentiment, I’m running a business.” That’s also wrong. The operators who build the best reputations in home services are almost always the ones who are known for something a little harder to name. The owner who calls after every job. The crew lead who remembers a customer’s dog’s name. The GM who sits with a struggling tech instead of just putting them on a performance plan. That stuff is not inefficient. It is the product, from the customer’s point of view.

The real lesson is narrower and more useful than either ditch.

AI belongs in the parts of your business where the human presence was never the value. It does not belong in the parts where the human presence is the entire point.

Knowing the difference is an operational decision, not a philosophical one. It requires you to look at each touchpoint in your business and ask: is a person here because we needed someone to do a task, or because the customer or the employee needed a person?

If it’s the task, automate it. If it’s the person, protect that.

The short version

Smucker’s essay went wide because it named something people already felt but hadn’t said out loud. Connection has texture. Efficiency doesn’t. Your business runs better when you are clear about which one you’re delivering at any given moment.

Use the tools. Just know what they’re for.

If you’re trying to figure out where AI actually fits in a home services operation, without the hype and without the overcorrection, that’s the kind of work we think about at xovionlabs.com.