My job title hasn't changed, but my actual job has.

Since the turn of this year, AI has moved faster than I've ever seen it move before.

Not gradually. Not "10% better quarter over quarter." Fast enough that entire job functions are being redesigned around it right now.

I see it every day in how we build Herodesk. I spend less time writing code and more time doing architecture, reviewing what AI tools produce, and steering the implementation in the right direction. The actual line-by-line work? Increasingly done by machines.

The analogy I keep coming back to is this: I've gone from being the person swinging the hammer to being the architect and project manager. I still have the technical skills to jump in and adjust things when I need to. But the heavy lifting is done by something else.

Customer service is heading in exactly the same direction.

In the near term (and I mean really near, maybe the rest of 2026 if that long) AI will reliably handle the lowest-hanging fruit in your support queue. Depending on how complex your business is, that could be 30% of incoming enquiries, or it could be 80%.

For a webshop, think about what that actually covers:

• "Where is my order?"
• "I want to cancel my order."
• "Can I change my delivery address?"
• Basic product questions

I call these either generic data lookups or simple actions. For a data lookup to work, the AI needs real-time access to your shop — verify the customer's identity, pull the order status, and return the tracking code. For an action, it needs to actually execute something in your system. Cancel the order. Pause the shipment. Update the address. Autonomously, without a human stepping in.

Basically: a digital colleague who is online 24/7, speaks every language, and never has a bad day.

We can already do a lot of this at Herodesk. What we're working on right now — and rolling out to our first customers this month — is full auto mode. Our AI agents will monitor every channel (email, live chat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs), read each message, respond if they can, and take action in your shop if needed. All without a human involved. All in any language.

I don't see this as "time to fire people." That framing misses the point entirely.

I see it the same way I see what's happened to software development. The developers I know who use AI tools well aren't being replaced. They're doing better work because they've stopped spending most of their day on the repetitive stuff.

The same shift is coming to customer service. Your team moves toward quality control, complex cases, training the agents, and reviewing what they do. That's a better use of their time than answering the same four questions on repeat.

The direction of travel is clear. The businesses that get this right now — by building AI into their support setup without compromising quality — will have more capacity for what actually matters.