The scale and scope of artificial intelligence’s (AI) involvement in our businesses is rightly central to daily discussions in boardrooms and future business planning right now.
Not a day goes by when there isn’t a headline around a new capacity or use for AI or a headline on mass job layoffs or predicted layoffs. It is creating varying sentiments that often crossover within the confines of a business. An audience that wants to know about potential opportunities. An alternate audience concerned and fearful of job losses.
Both discussions trace to the same questions: What can it do? What will it replace? How fast is it moving?
These questions are important. But they are incomplete.
The more important question is this: What does AI make more valuable?
The answer, in my experience, is trust.
AI is already transforming the mechanics of business. It processes information faster than any human team. It drafts, summarises, analyses, and responds at scale. These are genuine advantages, and any serious advisory would be foolish to ignore them.
But there is something AI cannot do. It cannot sit down with a head of state and read the room. It cannot sense the hesitation in a client's voice that signals the real concern behind a stated subject. It cannot build the kind of relationship where a principal calls you before they call anyone else.
A recent global study by Zurich Insurance Group, conducted with Stanford University, found that 71% of consumers believe AI cannot create genuine human connections. More striking still, 73% actively avoid businesses that fail to demonstrate empathy. As Stanford Professor of Psychology Jamil Zaki observed:
"An AI bot can understand you, but it cannot genuinely feel with you."
This is not sentiment. It is a commercial reality.
Tim Klabunde of Growth Impact Partners puts it plainly:
"AI isn't here to replace relationships. It's here to expose who actually has them."
When expertise becomes commoditised — when every firm has access to the same tools, the same data, the same baseline competence — the only remaining differentiator is trust. And trust is built through relationships, not deliverables.
Psychologist Joanne Irving PhD frames it with precision:
"Real relationships require what I call the C² Factor: the alchemy of curiosity and courage."
These are qualities no algorithm can replicate. The willingness to ask a difficult question. The courage to offer an honest assessment that a client may not want to hear. The patience to tend a relationship through complexity and change.
In the channels where Barandu operates, the most consequential decisions are never made on the basis of data alone. They are made by people, for people, in the context of relationships built over years.
AI will continue to support the process of business operations. But it should never replace empathetic, honest, long-time relationship building and engagement.