A letter from Baudville Brands CEO, Brad Darooge
Since stepping into the CEO role of Baudville 20 years ago, I have had the privilege of witnessing the power of gratitude in action within our business. And while I love to steward moments of recognition within our own walls, the lens I have into the millions of moments of appreciation we facilitate around the globe for our customers has me reflecting on what the future of person to person gratitude will look like in this AI intoxicated world we are marching into.
Don’t get me wrong – our business is moving towards the opportunities that AI presents to improve customer experience, business intelligence and technology adoption as we all learn to adapt and evolve – but what does that evolution mean for us as purveyors of gratitude. Will people become less personally connected –do the recent waves of staff reductions mean that companies will care less about the people they have – will we all someday just be working for the robots?
I, like you, don’t have a crystal ball to answer our deepest questions but in many ways the more I read – the more I use - and the more I think about the future impact of AI, on my business, my children and our society, the more I become convinced that the power of real appreciation is more important now than perhaps at any time I have had the privilege of occupying this seat and serving so many of you.
We have been on a slow slide away from human-to-human connection since the advent of email 40 years ago (half of my team doesn't even understand a water cooler reference), accelerated by Apple and the smartphone almost 20 years ago, COVID brought us work alone (I mean from home) and now we face a new accelerant of disconnection with AI today. And yet for all this ‘advancement’ we remain Human in our innate desire to have real connections with real people.
As organizations look to maximize the potential of AI it will be important for us all to remember that it will be a very long time before the bots are customers of anything. Who we all sell to are real people, working in real companies and those people will, as long as I can imagine, want to been seen, be appreciated, and be connected to something bigger than themselves. It is human nature, it is who we are. For the sake of our work communities big and small, I am hopeful that we will all embrace the opportunity we have to make the people around us feel a little more appreciated. AI is an enabler and we will continue to weigh the ways in which it can help enable you to make more human connections – but know that we stand by as we have for the last 43 years, ready to help make your next moment of real gratitude and appreciation more genuine, more impactful, and more human.
Cheers.
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