‘The Listening Path’ creator warns against letting AI do all the talking

About a year and a half ago, Christine Miles was looking for a new apartment, and reached electronically to a property owner to see if they had any units with elevators. She was told the property had three, and even provided her the room numbers.

When she showed up, it turned out none of the units had elevators. “I had sent a note to what ostensibly was a person,” she recalled. “(but) that was an AI bot that basically just didn’t interpret what I was asking at all.”

That AI bot – or at least the organization behind it – could have benefitted from The Listening Path, a system Miles developed that is designed to teach everyone from students to businesses how to truly understand what they hear.

Miles has been delivering the Listening Path through live training sessions and workshops via her company, EQuipt. To scale more effectively, however, Miles said she and her team and developed an animated approach to her methodology that can be taken virtually and asynchronously.

As more organizations risk confusing, disappointing or even alienating customers by making AI a greater part of functions like customer service, Miles believes the Listening Path is more needed than ever before. That’s because many organizations may already be failing to pay attention to customers before AI is even part of their plan.

“Our biggest problem is that people assume that they’re listening because they have the ability to hear, just like they assume they’re walking well because they have legs,” Miles told 360 Magazine. “But having legs doesn’t mean you’re on balance, or you don’t have problems, or that you couldn’t be better at it.”

CX leaders might argue that AI is the best way to improve their ability to listen to customers because of all the data it gathers, synthesizes and analyzes as part of its functionality. Miles said the reality is like the difference between talking to an account versus a chief financial officer (CFO).

“A really skilled CFO can tell the story with the numbers they’re seeing and it relevant to all the key stakeholders within the company,” she said. “An accountant may not have that ability.  They’re just collecting data, making sure the numbers match. There’s no story or emotion behind it.”

Miles’ book, What Is It Costing You Not To Listen?, was published in 2021, a year before ChatGPT first started raising awareness of generative AI and well ahead of the current focus on agentic AI. She said she’s not against the technology and recognizes that more organizations will need it to stay competitive. Her caution is against using AI to outsource your ability to communicate rather than improve how you communicate to customers.

“AI is the ultimate narcissist,” she said. “It is not actually empathetic, it doesn’t care. And it’s really hard to understand someone when you don’t try to empathize with them.”

The Listening Path is designed to help close that gap by helping organizations build a culture of understanding through common language and tools. Miles said this puts listening at the center of how work gets done, which tends to have a positive impact on areas where human oversight is core to making AI work, such as sound judgment.

“Not listening is more like death by 1,000 cuts versus a gaping wound. It takes, many interactions of not being heard before you say, ‘I’m done,’” she said. “We have to help organizations identify that this is a core skill because when they work on it, lots of things get better. Teaching gets better. Innovation gets better. Problem solving gets better.”