Mastering AI Without Losing the Human Touch

Jim's Full Sterne Ahead piece profiles Anthony Hamilton, co-founder of THE Water Heater Company in Camarillo. Twenty-five employees, thirteen field techs, hiring seven more, serving Santa Barbara County down through Orange County. Their rule is automate internally and keep humans in front of the customer. They tried AI on the phones and killed it fast because customers didn't like it and held the machine to a higher standard than they'd hold a person. Chatbots got replaced by an automated email that promises a human follow-up. Where AI actually earned its keep was content and operations. A 1,600-page site with a dedicated page per city, built on local water quality data Hamilton spent months collecting. Internal memos, SOPs, brochures, catalogs. A 100-question applicant assessment scored against a rubric. Branded review PDFs assembled by an office coordinator using a design system Hamilton built in Claude.

The two hard parts are the useful part for us. First, tool churn. Hamilton's line is that constant learning with nothing shipped is a disaster, and that people should sit down without AI and decide their priorities before plugging anything in. Second, change management, because people resist tools that feel imposed or that threaten their sense of competence. He also names the documentation bottleneck directly: people who know a process know it by muscle memory and can't easily explain it. His workaround is to dictate the task out loud while doing it, then run the transcript through an AI skill that enforces SOP structure. That's a workshop exercise sitting right there. Next want is a support agent trained on his manuals and call transcripts, with an orchestrator above it. His framing is enhance, not replace.

The complete article is on Jim's LinkedIn Blog