My father-in-law recently sent me an article by Frank Bruni from the New York Times. Neither is a tech expert, but they hit the nail squarely on the head when it comes to making technology usable. Our modern conveniences are exhaustingly inconvenient, as the headline read, and the “the paradoxes of progress” smack us in the face. A little humanity can be helpful – and sometimes necessary.

We have to say, first off, that technology has given us some highly useful gadgets. The Ring doorbell, just to cite one example, enabled us to monitor and interact with our front door visitors from anywhere. It’s a convenience and a security tool, and early on, it helped us manage deliveries for business. Today, as Frank Bruni writes, it’s so much more. He has relished how it lets him know if a package has arrived, a service provider has shown up or his dog is staying put and behaving in the front yard. But when he got a new phone, the app didn’t accept his password, even though his computer did. It took him two weeks to resolve his problem.

Bruni didn’t say if he tried to contact a human at Ring. You have to scroll all the way to the bottom of its website and go through a few clicks to get a phone number. If you can’t easily speak to a human, you may not get a solution, or you may be exhausted from going through a menu tree. If you have a security issue with your product, the difficulty in reaching a human is intolerable.

But let’s put this into a business situation. More businesses are using the internet to move large sums of money, and some of that is being done by an AI-powered chatbot. Why do they do this? AI is programmed by humans, based on reactions humans have to situations. If you raise an unanticipated question, the chatbot will stumble.

This came up with a client who thought they had been hacked. They were given wiring instructions in an email from someone they had not dealt with before. They were right to question the email. As we pointed out in our previous article, the more complex a network might be, the more risk there is of something going wrong. And cybersecurity is today’s big corporate concern.

Our client really needed a human solution more than a technical solution to verify the wire transfer instructions. When you get an electronic message from someone you don’t recognize, you must take steps to verify its authenticity. Independently from the message, call a person you know at the financial institution or the organization that invoiced you. A person can reassure you. An AI chatbot can’t.

On your side, we can help you set up email handling rules based on senders’ names and subject lines that pertain to invoices you need to pay and payment methods to use. At the very least, it will help you flag and re-examine emails on financial matters and see who you may need to talk to. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to talk about it.