I went to Amsterdam (technically Utrecht) this week to speak at Scrum Day Europe. My wife went with me. I chose a nice looking hotel online with a canal view in an 18th century Dutch building. It was pouring rain and windy when we arrived (so, a standard Dutch day?) and we were eager to get inside and warm. There was no reception desk, no one there to greet us or check us in. Instead there was a 50cm tall glass box that said, a bit like an Alice in Wonderland prompt, “touch screen.” We touched the screen (that did not look like a screen) and a few seconds later a man appeared in the box – a hologram, not an actual human being. The hologram was a projection of a real person, not AI. The interaction was awkward and filled with random, minor but annoying answers that an actual on-premise human could have answered easily. Once again, a company was deploying technology for the sake of the technology without consideration for the actual customer experience. As we head into 2026 and our stakeholders clamor for even more AI, remember that compellingly solving real problems for real customers is still the best way to succeed. 

Hotels, printers and chatbots, oh my! 

My printer, which I bought close to 10 years ago, has also been “upgraded” to a crappier customer experience. When I bought it I just needed to buy ink when the ink ran out (makes sense, no?). A few years ago my printer’s firmware was updated and now I have to subscribe to ink. Every month my printer counts and reports how much printing I’ve done. It turns out I have a limit. Once a certain threshold is reached it charges my credit card and sends me more ink. This is the only way to use my printer. If I disconnect it from the internet it will eventually refuse to print. This isn’t what I bought nor what I want nor a problem I needed solved. Once again, some executive-driven directive was forced upon happy users. 

My friend, Adrian Howard, received an advertisement from his CO2 filter. I know he was looking forward to that. 

And don’t get me started on the overwhelming crappiness of “customer support” chat bots on most websites today. Best of luck with those too. 

We don’t have to use all the tech all the time

We have such incredible technology available to use today it’s intoxicating. The rush to deploy it continues to enshittify, as Cory Doctrow puts it, our products, services and customer experiences. We’re no longer looking for opportunities to make our services more compelling but rather rushing to cut costs and tick boxes our stakeholders demand get ticked. 

At the conference in Utrecht I showed the photo of the hologram receptionist to a few folks. One of them recognized the tech and suggested it was designed to solve the waste created by hotel reception teams during their downtime which could add up to several hours per shift. Why have a team sitting around when they can work out of a central location (or at home) and service other hotels at the same time? I appreciate that. Finding ways to reduce costs makes sense for any business. But, at the risk of being repetitive, at what cost does that come to the customer experience? 

Use the tech to make the customer happy

The hologram receptionist box was located immediately outside our door. Every time there was an interaction with a hotel guest, we heard it. Every check-in and check-out, complaint, question or request was part of our customer experience. There’s a reason why reception desks are positioned in specific ways in hotels. We won’t come back to this hotel in the future. The hologram receptionist is the main reason.

Instead, how might this hotel have used new technology to make our experience better while still reducing costs? That is the product challenge we face now. AI will make all of us more productive and, at some point, reduce the cost of operating parts of our businesses. How do we ensure that along the way we don’t cut too deeply, damaging the customer experience and causing a customer backlash? That is what good product management and user experience design is all about. And that is how companies will win the “AI race.”