You are the inventory, not the customer
AI is rewriting the contract between companies and their customers.
Meta lost the human touch a long time ago.
Recently there have been many reports of Instagram accounts, some with very large followings, being deleted because of… well, nobody really knows.
For decades, the basic deal was: if something goes wrong, a human will hear you out. Maybe not quickly, maybe not happily, but eventually a person would read your complaint and make a judgement. That handshake agreement is being quietly dismantled across most large platforms.
Meta is the clearest example I’ve seen up close.
Every interaction with the platform now runs through a machine. Account reviews, appeals, support requests, content moderation, identity verification – all automated, all opaque, all final.
We’ve spent the last several weeks fighting to recover an Instagram account we built over ten years. Someone kept reporting us. The account was deleted.
There is no recourse, the help centre loops you back through the same forms. The only humans at Meta who will actually speak to you, quite happily, are the sales people.
Think about what that means as a design choice.
A platform with billions of users has decided that the relationship with everyone who built something on it, small businesses, creators, community pages, family memories going back over a decade, is not worth a single human conversation. Unless you’re buying ads.
The bigger lesson for anyone building on these platforms: the advertisers are the customer. Everyone else is inventory.
What we’re losing is not customer service. We’re losing the basic principle that human communities were built on.
The uncomfortable question for anyone running a business right now is which side of this you want to be on.
Cheaper and impersonal, or relational and accountable?
Curious where others are seeing this play out. Banking? Insurance? Government services? The Meta case is just the one I’m living through.
#AI #Meta #SmallBusiness #CustomerExperience #Accountability