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Chris Hillman<br>Saturday, June 13, 2026
The Competitive Moat That AI Can't Replicate
Human Connection<br>Trust<br>Customer Experience<br>Leadership<br>AI<br>Employee Experience<br>Organisational Culture
The Restaurant That Refused to Take Bookings Online
Let me tell you a story about a restaurant owner who became obsessed with human connection.<br>He didn’t want people booking online. He wanted them to call. He wanted the ritual of a human voice, the small exchange about an anniversary or a first date, the warmth of being recognised. His team thought he was losing his mind. Online bookings were standard. Everyone did it. Why make customers work harder?<br>One of the managers finally asked him a pointed question: Have you ever actually made a reservation with us?<br>He hadn’t. So he did.<br>He called the restaurant. He was put on hold for thirty minutes. When someone finally answered, they were apologetic but firm — the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door.<br>In trying to humanise the process, he’d made it worse.<br>Here’s where most stories would end with “so they moved everything online and fired the reservation staff.” That’s not what happened. They did move to online booking, but they kept the entire reservation team and repurposed them. These people now spent their days learning about the customers coming in that night. Who was celebrating a birthday? Who was on a first date? What had a regular not finished on their plate six months ago?<br>The team became mini-concierges. Every guest walked in to find someone who knew them — not in a creepy, surveillance-state way, but in the way a good friend remembers what you’re going through. The technology handled the transactional layer so the humans could focus on the relational layer.<br>I’m telling you this story because it captures something I think most organisations have forgotten in the rush to automate everything: the work of connection isn’t overhead. It’s the point. And as AI swallows the transactional layer of every industry at once, that relational layer is about to become the only point of difference left.
Trust Is Built One Marble at a Time
Brené Brown tells a story about her daughter Ellen that I realate to. Ellen came home from third grade devastated. She’d shared something vulnerable with a friend at recess, and by the time class started again, half the school knew. She told her mum, through tears, that she would never trust anyone again.<br>Brown’s first instinct, honestly, was to agree. Tell no one anything, ever. But she caught herself and offered a different idea — the marble jar. There’s a jar in Ellen’s classroom where good choices add marbles and bad ones remove them. When the jar fills up, the class celebrates. Trust, Brown told her, works the same way. You share the hard things with people who have filled up your marble jar over time. Marble by marble. Small moment by small moment.<br>Ellen immediately named two friends whose jars were full.<br>What stopped Brown cold was what counted as marbles....