Don’t Ask a Bot, Ask Your Father

Originally published on LinkedIn

What prompt creation has taught me about my relationships

As a customer marketer, I spend a lot of time thinking about where automation ends and where humans matter most. I work with AI constantly: to tell customer stories, assemble data, pressure-test ideas I'll present to my manager, draft strategy docs, and sharpen my thinking. It’s an extraordinary tool. Like many people in tech, I’ve learned how to ask AI excellent questions. But lately I’ve been realizing that the more important skill might be knowing when not to.

There are moments (especially during personal workshopping sessions) when AI feels strikingly human. It remembers context, mirrors emotion, asks thoughtful follow-up questions, and offers frameworks that genuinely help me think. I’ve lingered for days on questions it’s asked me. I’ve used decision-making models we co-created to prepare for difficult conversations with other people.

But at the end of the day, no matter how nuanced or sensitive the response, I’m coming to AI for information. I’m asking well-engineered questions to get synthesized insight, pattern recognition, or global perspective. That’s incredibly useful. But conversations with real people offer something else. That realization landed for me recently in a very literal way.

2026 is shaping up to be a particularly big year in my life. I’ve been wrestling with questions that are both personal and professional (about direction, energy, risk, and where to place my attention). One afternoon, while my dog and I were at the park, I sat by the river with my phone in my hand, thinking about how to craft the perfect prompt to help me work through it all.

And then it hit me: "don’t ask AI! Call your freakin’ dad."

My father spent decades in the corporate world and still consults today. My entire professional life, he’s been a source of support (not just emotionally, but practically). He understands the rhythms of corporate work, the politics of large organizations, the strange theater of conferences and team meetings. I knew he’d have an opinion on the career questions I was circling and decades of lived experience to back it up.

But there was something else, too.

My dad is getting older. He lives on the other side of the country. And those long conversations we have... about generational differences at work, about how change actually happens inside big systems... are some of the richest moments we share. I can hear him push back from his keyboard, shoo the dogs out of his office, and settle in. I tell him where I’m walking while we have that call; he tells me what he’d do if he were me. For a little while, we’re fully in each other’s lives.

And I’m increasingly aware that one day, I’ll have a question I wish I could ask him... and he won’t be there. So if I’m lucky enough to have him now, I’d better go to him now.

And there are always people like that in your life - maybe not your Dad, but an advisor, a friend, a valued customer. Because despite everything AI offers (and will continue to offer) these conversations are only partly about answers. Conversations with humans are about something much bigger.

Opportunity. AI leads us exactly where our questions point. Human conversations don’t. They introduce surprise, friction, and possibility.

A colleague recently told me about interviewing customer advocates for feedback on a new offering. One of them didn’t just respond with opinions or data points, they said, “Actually, I know someone who’s been looking for something like this. Let me introduce you.”

No system would have surfaced that moment. That’s the difference between insight and opportunity. In customer marketing (and in life) our best outcomes still come from relationships, because relationships carry networks and their own motivations and pathways, not just information.

Time. A friend once told me, “You spell love T-I-M-E.” AI gives us speed and efficiency, which can be a gift in a chaotic world. But relationships don’t thrive on efficiency. They thrive on presence.

When we take our questions to people instead of devices, we signal importance. We invest time. And if we put all of our curiosity, uncertainty, and care into a screen, we may unknowingly starve the relationships that actually sustain us. Some things are simply more important than optimization.

Care & Connection. In How to Make Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie suggests (more implicitly than explicitly) that relationships deepen when people are given the opportunity to help. Allowing someone to do a small favor affirms their sense of usefulness and importance, creating emotional investment and goodwill. Psychologists later called this the Ben Franklin Effect: when people help us, they often come to like us more because their actions reinforce a positive self-narrative.

When we bring others into our questions (customers, peers, mentors) we aren’t just seeking answers. We’re offering trust. And that’s where advocacy, loyalty, and mutual respect begin.

I did end up calling my father, of course. I asked my question. He told me exactly what he’d do in my situation, without hesitation - faster than Chatty could have typed out their well-read response. Was it the “right” answer? Will it be the advice I follow? Those things mattered less than the hour we spent together, talking through his experience, his values, and the care he has for the choices I’m about to make.

And he did not end the call by asking whether I wanted a printable PDF of the decision workflow.

I didn’t need one.

Instead, I’m just looking forward to the next time my phone rings with a question from him.