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The Daily Carnage

october 20, 2026

AI With a Human Touch?

Finding the right balance between automation and human connection in customer service.

News

Be in The Know

📺 Meta wants to sell marketers their old TV strategy back.

🌯 Chipotle embraces its chronically online social strategy.

🤖 A new document challenges what we think about AI.

💻 Hackers target AI coding tool OpenCode, leaving users with charges.

🎤 Six questions to ask before hiring an event speaker.

💰 Menopause is becoming a lucrative consumer market.

Tactics

Know When to Hand It Off

AI can answer customer questions in seconds, route support tickets, and keep service available around the clock. Sounds great, until a frustrated customer gets stuck explaining the same problem to a chatbot for the fifth time.

The challenge is knowing which interactions benefit from automation and which ones need an actual person. A well-designed support experience should make both options work together.

Here’s how to find that balance:

  • Automate the predictable. Use AI for FAQs, order updates, appointment scheduling, and other repetitive requests.
  • Make escalation easy. Give customers a clear way to reach a human when the issue becomes complex, sensitive, or frustrating.
  • Keep the context. When a conversation moves from bot to agent, transfer the customer’s history so they don’t have to start over.
  • Be transparent. Let customers know when they’re interacting with AI instead of pretending the bot is a person.
  • Support your agents. Use AI to surface relevant information, summarize conversations, and suggest helpful resources during live interactions.
  • Watch for frustration. Pay attention to repeated questions, unresolved requests, and conversations that need multiple transfers.

A faster response isn’t necessarily a better one. Sometimes the smartest thing your chatbot can do is recognize when it’s time to bring someone else into the conversation.

Head to Social Media Explorer for more.

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The Daily Carnage Show

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Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show, here’s what we’re covering:

🔒 Apple’s secret blocklist: How Safari’s restrictions work and which ad tech companies have been affected.

📉 The impact on advertisers and publishers: Why disruptions to ad delivery and audience signals could affect campaign performance, publisher revenue, and programmatic advertising.

📊 The measurement problem: Why winning an ad auction doesn’t always mean an ad actually appeared on a user’s screen.

⚖️ Privacy vs. platform power: What happens when the company controlling the browser also operates an advertising business?

🛠️ What marketers should do next: Audit your ad tech dependencies, verify campaign delivery, strengthen your first-party data strategy, and ask vendors about their contingency plans.

Apple’s approach raises a bigger question for the open web: How do we protect user privacy while maintaining the infrastructure that supports digital advertising?

🎙️ Plus, catch up on Season 2:

🎙️ Now streaming on Youtube, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Music.

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Watch

Monster Problems

Even the Thing family has to deal with a broken boiler.

British Gas brings the furry, chaotic family back for a new campaign where a typical Monday morning goes downhill fast. Between breakfast preparations and kids running wild, everything comes to a halt when teenager Ash discovers there’s no hot water and lets out a scream.

While the rest of the family panics, Dad calmly books a British Gas engineer through the app. Crisis averted.

Even monsters have very human household problems.

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