In the middle of one of the surveys I ran about how product people do discovery, a participant stopped to raise an interesting doubt. She works with AI, sees the use of AI as a natural move, and still wondered:
“People still prefer to talk to humans. Opening up to a human, not everyone is comfortable with a contact that, however human it feels, is still not a person on the other side.”
And she went further. She suggested the way to settle the doubt:
“The ideal would be a test, to validate whether people really don’t open up to something that isn’t human.”
She was right to ask for the test. And the test was happening while she spoke.
Look at what she did. To tell us that people don’t open up to an AI, she opened up to an AI. She told us about her company’s culture, her own doubts, what would or wouldn’t make her adopt a tool. A long paragraph, thoughtful, sincere, written to our agent, on WhatsApp. Her doubt already carried its own answer.
And it wasn’t only her.
What 149 conversations showed
So far we have 149 conversations about how product people do discovery, all with valuable insight, many in long, reflective answers, the kind no one writes when they are afraid to open up.
One person vented an internal defeat they would hardly share in a meeting room:
“I always defended this, but I was torn apart.”
Another acknowledged, without defensiveness, a limit of their own seniority:
“I don’t interview any users right now. Since I’m junior, my discovery starts there.”
Another exposed a failure of their own employer, with rare frankness:
“At the bank where I work, no continuous discovery happens at all. We race against the clock and there is always rework.”
No one is obliged to confess a defeat to a form. No one admits their own inexperience, or criticizes their own employer, in a cold survey. These people were not filling out a questionnaire. They were having a conversation.
Why people open up
What we see in the dynamic of conversations with AI is that three things lower people’s guard, and none of them depends on pretending the agent is human:
The first is the person’s own time. The conversation is asynchronous. No one is waiting on the other side, no one is watching the clock. The person answers when they want, the way they want, with as much depth as they want. The pressure to perform that exists in a scheduled call, where you feel you are taking up someone’s time, is gone.
The second is the absence of judgment. Saying “I’m junior, my discovery starts there” to another professional costs something. Saying it to an agent that only wants to understand costs nothing. No audience, no hierarchy, no risk of looking small. The hesitation fades because there is no one to impress.
The third is the place. The conversation happens on WhatsApp, where the person already lives. It is not a strange link, not a video call room, not a new piece of software to learn. It is the same app where they talk to family and to their team. The setting is familiar, and the familiar relaxes us.
The doubt was right, and so was the answer
The participant asked whether people open up to something that isn’t human. The honest answer is: yes, and sometimes more than they would to a human. Not because the agent fools anyone, no one there thinks they are talking to a person. But because the absence of another human removes exactly what holds a conversation back, the clock, the judgment, the formality.
She asked for a test. So far, 149 conversations, including the one with the person who had the doubt, have shown that people do open up to an AI.
Data tells us what happened. Customers tell us why. And, by all indications, they tell us why with a frankness that may be even greater than in conversations with humans.