The businesses AI will kill are not the ones everybody thinks.
Most people believe AI will replace simple jobs, but the real threat is to businesses that survive on customer inertia. Their advantage is not quality, but the sheer hassle of leaving. These are the companies that thrive on friction, on lock-in, on the fact that switching is so miserable that customers stay even if they resent it. Think of your cable company, the bank with its thirty-minute cancellation hold music, or the office software everyone hates but never replaces. These businesses are not winning customers, they are holding them hostage.
At its core, AI dissolves friction. It compares your options, handles the switch, fills out the forms, sits on hold, cancels the old service, and sets up the new one. All the tedious misery that once trapped customers melts away when a tireless assistant can do it all on your behalf.
We are already seeing previews of this. People are using AI to fight parking tickets, draft complaint letters, and navigate the bureaucratic sludge of insurance claims and subscription cancellations, all the tiresome tasks companies rely on you being too exhausted to complete. The business model of "make leaving exhausting" assumes the customer's patience will run out first. AI has no patience to run out.
Imagine a service provider with a cancellation process designed to break your will, a website built to confuse, and a retention department trained to wear you down. Their entire strategy is built on difficulty. Now a customer's AI can navigate that labyrinth in minutes, without frustration or fatigue. The escape hatch they spent years welding shut has just been picked open by a machine that cannot be guilted into staying "just one more year."
The flip side, for the business reading this
Businesses that genuinely win by being good have nothing to fear and much to gain. When switching becomes effortless, they inherit all the customers who were trapped elsewhere. But the companies that profit from being difficult to leave are about to discover their customers were never really loyal. When the exit becomes easy, everyone who stayed out of inertia walks out at once, and the bill for every piece of friction they ever created comes due in a single, sudden rush.
If you run a business, that is not a threat. It is the best news in a decade, because it means the old moat, being annoying to escape, is draining, and the new moat is simply being good to deal with. And being good to deal with is now something a small business can actually deliver: instantly reachable, genuinely helpful, accurate because it answers from your real information rather than a script, on every channel your customers use. That accuracy is not a hope. In production at companies handling more than 100,000 interactions a month, the grounded pipeline runs at 97%+ accuracy, and on the rare question it cannot ground in your real information it says "I do not know" and hands off to a person rather than inventing something. And friction does not just disappear on the way out, it disappears on the way in too: at Curacao Department Stores the 24/7 phone line resolves more than 85% of calls on its own, no transfer, no hold music, no labyrinth. The thing that used to require a giant's call center now costs a few hundred a month. The friction-based businesses spent years welding the exit shut. The good ones get to spend the next few years leaving the front door wide open, because they want people to be able to leave, and to keep choosing to stay anyway. (That "good to deal with" feeling is increasingly carried by your AI, which is the whole argument in Your AI Is Your New Front Desk.)
The reckoning is not coming for the simple jobs. It is coming for the businesses that confused being unpleasant to escape with being worth keeping.
