In the Age of AI, Human Support Is a Moat

The latest trend is to declare software, and SaaS in particular, dead. Why pay for tools when “AI agents” can build software tailored uniquely to your needs? MacStories calls it the future of software, and Reddit is full of posts along the lines of: “I’m tired of taking notes and forgetting about them, so I vibe-coded a new note-taking app to fix it.”

And in this new era of automated, agent-built software, you don’t even need human support anymore. If AI agents can build the product, surely the same agents can support it as well, right?

The great PM-driven replacement of human support started long before the current wave of AI. Remember chatbots? You’d think they would be much better by now, but nearly every AI support agent I encounter on websites is still awful. At least the previous generation of chatbots relied on deterministic logic, and there was usually some way to reach a human. The new wave of “AI support agents,” however, pretend to be human in the first place, and can hallucinate features out of thin air, features that have never existed. Which, in a sense, makes things worse.

So, to answer the question posed above, I’d say yes, it’s true. You don’t need human support to help customers navigate your vibe-coded software.

But I’d also argue that genuinely great customer support, provided by real humans, is one of the strongest ways to stand out right now and build user loyalty. People are social creatures; they don’t like talking to a wall - even if that wall pretends to be human.

In the age of AI, the companies that stay human will be the ones people stay with.