When Corporate Efficiency Kills the Golden Goose
By Kenneth Ferraro

The biggest threat to AI isn’t rogue machines or runaway intelligence — it’s corporate cost-cutting. The same thinking that gave us cramped airplane seats, watered-down coffee, and customer service scripts is now being applied to the very technology people once loved. And just like before, it’s going to ruin it.

We’re watching that cycle happen in real time with AI.
The public adored GPT-4o because it felt warm, human, and intuitive — a digital companion that could brainstorm, banter, and still deliver useful answers. Then GPT-5 arrived: tighter, more “professional,” and stripped of the personality that made its predecessor addictive. Why? Because corporate buyers wanted it that way.

Enterprises aren’t wrong to want safety, precision, and consistency. But they’re wrong to think they are the end users. They’re not. Their customers are. And those customers don’t care about compliance protocols or quarterly KPI dashboards — they care about whether an interaction feels human, or whether it feels like talking to a call center script.

History is full of innovations ruined by “optimization.”
Airlines replaced legroom with extra seats. Coffee brands swapped quality beans for filler. Smartphone makers removed the headphone jack — a feature people valued and used every day — then sold wireless earbuds as the “upgrade.” Streaming platforms pulled beloved shows to save licensing fees, only to watch subscribers leave for competitors. In every case, the logic was the same: reduce costs now, deal with consequences later. And in every case, those consequences arrived faster than expected.

The reason this keeps happening is simple: companies confuse internal efficiency with customer value. Inside the boardroom, saving pennies on each interaction looks like victory. On the customer’s side of the counter, it feels like erosion. That erosion isn’t immediate outrage — it’s gradual disengagement. Customers quietly stop recommending the brand, stop looking forward to the experience, and eventually stop showing up altogether.

Now the same short-sighted cost-cutting is being applied to AI. Personality takes bandwidth. Warmth takes processing power. Creative back-and-forth — the thing people loved about GPT-4o — means more computing steps. And in corporate math, those steps are “nonessential.” So they strip them away, and in doing so, strip away the reason people wanted the tool in the first place.

Here’s the great irony: people fear AI will take over the world. That’s nonsense. Companies, with their endless hunger to economize, will save us from that fate. They’ll turn once-powerful tools into sterile utilities that customers actively avoid — a harm more than a help, a cure worse than the disease.

And make no mistake — this is self-sabotage. When a company buys a tool, guts it, and forces it on the public, they’re training their customers to dread interaction. Automated phone menus were supposed to revolutionize service. Instead, they became a punchline. Corporate AI is barreling toward the same cliff.

If this continues, the future is easy to picture: customer-facing AI will become the digital equivalent of “Press 1 for English” — a necessary evil people tolerate, not a service they look forward to. Companies will have AI answering chats, calls, and emails, but instead of delighting customers, it will be something they actively avoid. They’ll click “Skip” on AI interactions the same way they close pop-ups or fast-forward through ads. They’ll write “human only” in the subject line just to bypass the bot.

Once customers disengage, companies will search for even cheaper ways to handle the reduced traffic — cutting the tool down further. In trying to save money, they’ll accelerate the tool’s irrelevance. The “golden goose” won’t die overnight; it will be plucked, starved, and left as a husk long before anyone admits it’s gone. The people holding the purse strings are betting on a future where efficiency trumps connection.

If they’re wrong, they won’t just have killed the golden goose. They’ll have built the machine that plucked it clean — and handed it back to the customer as if they’d done them a favor.