Every Company Blaming "the AI" for a Bad Customer Experience Is Lying to You
You've seen the pattern by now: a company replaces human support with an AI chatbot, customers get furious at the robot's non-answers, and the company's official response is some version of "we're still training the system." Translation: we made a decision, it went badly, and we'd like you to be mad at the software instead of us.
That's not an AI problem. That's the Circular Blame Paradigm wearing a new costume.
The Pattern
The Circular Blame Paradigm shows up whenever a company can point at something, a tool, a vendor, a market condition, or an algorithm that absorbs the blame a person should be absorbing. AI is the most convenient scapegoat to arrive in years, because it genuinely sounds plausible. "The AI made a mistake" sounds like a technical hiccup. "We decided to cut support staff and replace them with an unfinished product" sounds like what actually happened.
The tell is always the same: does the company name a person who owns the decision to deploy, or does it just apologize on behalf of the technology? If it's the second one, nothing is going to change, because nothing was ever actually owned.
The Operator Move
When I walk into a business considering an AI rollout, support, sales, ops, or anything customer-facing, the first thing I do is name an owner before a single tool gets turned on. Not a committee. One person whose job is explicitly to monitor the gap between what the tool promises and what customers actually experience, with the authority to pull it back if that gap gets too wide. This ties directly to the Business Batting Order. If you don't know who's in the lineup to catch a bad AI interaction before it becomes a viral complaint, you've deployed a tool without deploying an accountable role.
Why This Matters at Your Size
You don't need enterprise scale to make this mistake. Plenty of small businesses are quietly rolling out AI-driven scheduling, support, or sales follow-up with zero named owner watching how it performs. When it goes sideways, "the AI did it" will feel like an easy out. It's the same easy out the big companies are taking, and it works exactly as poorly at your size as it does at theirs.
The Circular Blame Paradigm is one of the core diagnostic tools in my upcoming book, The Brown Box.