Non classéThe Great Reversal: When Talking to a Human Costs $10 Million
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The Great Reversal: When Talking to a Human Costs $10 Million

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AI has become the default service for everyone. Human contact, once the baseline of society, is turning into a luxury good reserved for the wealthy. For the first time in 200 years, technological progress is working in reverse.

Author’s Note: This essay examines how AI automation is creating a two-tier system where human interaction becomes a positional good. All claims are based on peer-reviewed research, industry reports, and direct corporate statements from 2023–2025.

This transformation isn’t theoretical. In October 2024, Dr. Claudia Civai of the University of London published research on 3,521 participants confirming that human contact is becoming a luxury good, with the wealthy significantly more willing to pay for access. At the same time, Gartner found that 64% of consumers reject AI in customer service, yet 60% of executives face pressure to adopt it anyway.

The gap between what companies want and what customers want has never been wider. And it’s more profitable than ever for those who can afford the human alternative.

The CEO Who Said It Out Loud

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, delivered the defining statement at London SXSW in 2025: “We think offering human customer service is always going to be a VIP thing.”

This wasn’t a prediction. It was a business strategy.

Klarna had just replaced the equivalent of 700 agents with an AI chatbot, reducing headcount from 5,000 to 3,000 employees in one year, with a target of 2,000. That’s a 60% workforce cut. The precedent is now set: AI is the default, humans are the premium upgrade.

Marc Benioff of Salesforce was more direct in September 2025: “I reduced headcount from 9,000 to about 5,000, because I need fewer heads.” Four thousand customer service jobs gone, mentioned casually between other topics.

The Dollar Value of Human Contact

Banks were first to translate access to humanity into exact dollar amounts. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Citibank now require $10 million in invested assets for guaranteed access to a dedicated human banker.

Here’s how the pricing ladder works in 2025:

Under $100,000: AI chatbots only. No direct human access.

$100,000 to $500,000: Limited human contact. Someone you might reach by phone, occasionally.

$500,000 to $2 million: Real private banking begins. You get an advisor who knows your name.

$10 million and above: Full human service. 24/7 concierge access and, critically, time. Time with a human who listens without watching a clock.

This isn’t metaphorical. It’s coded into every major bank’s CRM system, automatically routing your call to either a human or an algorithm based on your account balance.

How Other Industries Follow

The pattern extends across sectors, each with its own pricing structure for human access.

Education: Khan Academy’s AI tutor costs $4 per month. Tutors International charges $400,000 per year for a residential human tutor. The ratio between them is 1 to 43,750. Switzerland’s Institut auf dem Rosenberg charges $175,000 annually. At that price, you’re not buying education alone. You’re buying scarcity of intensive human attention.

Healthcare: The average NHS general practitioner spends 10 minutes per consultation. Concierge medicine offers 30 to 60 minutes for $2,000 to $24,000 annually. A concierge doctor manages 400 to 600 patients compared to over 2,000 in traditional practices. In the UK, each GP now oversees 2,294 patients on average, up 154 from the previous year.

Luxury brands: Hermès, LVMH, and Cartier use AI exclusively behind the scenes. Never in customer-facing roles. Never in visible creative processes. A 2024 study found that perceived AI in a product reduces perception of brand effort and craftsmanship. The strategy is clear: AI for mass market, humans for premium positioning.

What the Data Shows

Numbers from recent consumer surveys reveal the depth of customer resistance to AI-only service.

The Kinsta study from February-March 2025, surveying 1,011 American consumers, found:

93.4% prefer human interaction over AI
78.3% say humans solve problems faster than AI
80.6% believe AI is used primarily to cut costs, not improve service
49.6% would cancel a service due to AI-only customer support
41.5% would pay extra to access human representatives

That last statistic confirms the reversal. Nearly half of consumers are willing to pay a premium for what used to be standard service.

Human Time as a Premium Product

We can already see it happening. In late 2024, research led by Claudia Civai at the University of London described human contact itself as a scarce good, one that wealthier people are demonstrably more willing to pay for. Around the same time, Gartner released survey results showing that 64% of customers would prefer companies not to use AI for customer service, even though 60% of executives admitted they were under pressure to deploy it anyway. The divergence is striking: customers ask for human care, while companies deliver automation. The result is a market where empathy and human time are now positioned as premium products.

Klarna’s CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, said this openly in Davos. Their AI assistant had already replaced the work of 700 human agents. The company shrank its customer-service staff from 3,000 to around 2,300, while Siemiatkowski predicted that human support would always be “a VIP thing.” Salesforce’s Marc Benioff echoed the same principle a year earlier when he justified mass layoffs by stating, simply, that he needed “fewer heads.” Neither of these were casual remarks. They were explicit endorsements of a strategy where AI becomes the standard and human access is deliberately positioned as elite.

Nowhere is this logic clearer than in banking. Access to a real person is tied directly to how much money you have. JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citi, and Bank of America all reserve guaranteed, always-available human advisors for their wealthiest clients. JPMorgan’s Private Bank typically requires $10 million in investable assets. Citi Private Bank sets the bar even higher, at $25 million. Below those levels, contact becomes sporadic, automated, or simply unavailable. The threshold for uninterrupted human attention is no longer metaphorical. It is coded into account tiers.

Education, healthcare, and even luxury brands are following the same script. In education, Khan Academy now offers an AI tutor for $4 a month, while elite institutions like Switzerland’s Institut auf dem Rosenberg charge up to $175,000 annually. Bespoke residential tutors from Tutors International can reach $400,000 per year. In healthcare, NHS patients average less than ten minutes with a doctor. Concierge medicine, costing between $2,000 and $25,000 annually, offers half-hour or hour-long visits with dramatically smaller patient loads. In luxury markets, researchers have shown that consumers perceive AI involvement as reducing craftsmanship and brand value. That is why companies like Hermès or Cartier emphasize visible human work, even if they deploy automation behind the curtain.

The Historical Parallel

Understanding what makes this moment unique requires looking back at the last major technological transformation.

The Industrial Revolution (1760–1860) democratized access to manufactured goods. Before machines, handcrafted items were expensive luxuries. Technology was the new, costly option. Human craft was standard. Factories made previously elite goods affordable to ordinary people. The transformation was brutal and uneven, but ultimately expanded access.

The Digital Age (2020–2025) reverses this pattern. For the first time in 200 years, technological progress creates barriers rather than removing them. Screens were luxury items in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, the luxury is avoiding them. The wealthy limit their children’s screen time while screens proliferate in the lives of everyone else.

Industry insiders describe the emerging model explicitly. The 80/20 split: 80% of customers receive AI automation (low-cost tier), 20% receive human service (high-value tier).

Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO of Content Guru, describes the future plainly: “Human support could be included as a perk for certain customers… or customers might find themselves paying one-time fees to speak with a human agent on a certain topic, similarly to how customers pay fees to reserve a desired seat on a plane.”

The New Divide

The data backs this up, and it is not only the wealthy who notice. Kinsta’s 2025 national survey of U.S. consumers found that 93% prefer human interaction over AI. Nearly half said they would cancel a service if only AI support were offered. More than 40% said they would pay extra for guaranteed human representatives. What was once free, the ability to explain your problem to a person, is now a feature customers say they will pay to reclaim.

Scholars are starting to frame this change as a profound social reversal. Civai warns that the scarcity of human interaction could deepen inequality. Allison Pugh, in her book The Last Human Job, goes further, describing how basic care itself is turning into a positional good. Emily Bender of the University of Washington has argued that many AI deployments are not neutral but actively dehumanizing, eroding dignity through design choices that remove human judgment and context.

The broader historical picture makes the reversal clearer. The Industrial Revolution democratized access to manufactured goods. What had been luxuries became affordable to ordinary people. The digital turn of the 21st century is different. Instead of opening access, it closes it. In the 1980s, screens were luxury items. Today, the luxury is avoiding them. In service industries, the 80/20 split is already visible: eighty percent of customers routed to AI, twenty percent reserved for human interaction. The same divide that governed handcrafted goods in the 18th century is re-emerging in human time itself.

For most people, this is not a future scenario. It is daily life. With less than $100,000 in assets, you are almost certainly dealing with bots at your bank. Without half a million in yearly income, concierge medicine is out of reach. Without six-figure tuition budgets, your children rely on AI-assisted learning. Your complaints are triaged by chatbots, your marketing messages generated by algorithms, and your ability to reach a person determined by what your account is worth. At the other end of the spectrum, the ultra-wealthy have private bankers, concierge doctors, and human tutors whose entire role is to provide attention without time limits. Empathy itself has become a status marker.

What You Can Do

Individual action matters, particularly when coordinated with others. Here are concrete steps:

Choose companies offering human support when options exist. Communicate why you made that choice. Companies track these decisions.

Demand transparency about AI policies. When chatbots fail, file formal complaints. Make the cost of poor automation visible in their metrics.

Support regulatory action. Contact elected representatives about AI customer service standards. The European Union is already moving on this. Other regions can follow.

Invest in local community. As digital interaction increases, face-to-face connection becomes more valuable. Prioritize in-person relationships, mutual aid networks, and community organizations.

Develop skills AI can’t easily replicate. Jobs serving wealthy clients or requiring complex human judgment are most likely to survive. Focus on emotional intelligence, creative problem-solving, and specialized expertise.

Join collective efforts. Workers and consumers have more leverage together than alone. Support unions, consumer advocacy groups, and organized resistance to dehumanizing automation.

The technology isn’t inevitable. The business models aren’t fixed. Every choice to prioritize human contact, demand accountability, or organize collectively pushes back against the two-tier future.

The Question Before Us

The open question is whether this trajectory is inevitable. Collective consumer behavior still matters. Choosing companies that prioritize human support, demanding transparency in AI deployments, supporting regulation of service standards, and investing in local community ties are all concrete steps that push against the two-tier divide. Skills rooted in emotional intelligence, creative problem-solving, and human judgment are also less replaceable than routine service roles.

The issue, then, is not whether you personally prefer talking to a bot or a human. It is whether you can afford to choose. For most of the population, that choice is already made by financial thresholds and optimization spreadsheets. The great reversal has arrived. Technology no longer expands access. It stratifies it.

Sources & Links

The Great Reversal: When Talking to a Human Costs $10 Million was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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