The Doorman Fallacy
AI isn't failing, our assumptions are.
A recent piece in The Conversation sparked this for me — exploring what Rory Sutherland calls the doorman fallacy, and why companies so often misfire when they try to automate human roles.
Walk into a great hotel and you don’t meet a door.
You meet the doorman.
He doesn’t just pull the handle. He clock-scans the sidewalk before you arrive. He spots the cab that’s actually stopping for you, not the one just unloading luggage. He gives a subtle nod to security behind the glass when a stranger hesitates a beat too long. He greets the elderly couple like returning royalty and the jet-lagged business traveler with a knowing “Welcome back — long flight?”
You feel safer. The building feels smarter.
It feels like someone is paying attention.
A sliding glass door can’t do that.
A chatbot can’t either.
That’s the doorman fallacy: mistaking the visible task for the entire job. Thinking the value is in opening the door rather than holding the space.
Companies keep falling for it. Tech arrives, tasks get automated, and leadership congratulates itself… until reality shows up with a low Yelp score and customers quietly defecting.
Take Taco Bell’s drive-thru experiment.
The theory: AI ordering = faster service + fewer errors.
The reality: glitch videos on TikTok, laughter turning into frustration, and humans quietly returning to clean up the experience.
Or banks that proudly laid off live agents for AI voice systems… only to rehire them after discovering customers didn’t enjoy arguing with software about fraud alerts or loan questions.
It’s not that AI is bad.
It’s that we keep pointing it at the wrong layer of the job.
AI handles repetition beautifully.
It excels at pattern recognition, prediction, consistency.
Humans handle the messy arc of real life:
The guest who’s in a hurry but also anxious
The angry caller who isn’t really angry — just scared
The ambiguous moment that could turn into a crisis or nothing at all
The micro-judgment that keeps a situation smooth instead of escalated
AI can open the door.
Only humans know why it mattered in that moment.
The future isn’t “replace the doorman with automation.”
It’s “give the doorman superpowers.”
AI as exoskeleton, not eraser.
Amplifier, not substitute.
The companies that win in this next phase won’t be the ones who cut staff in a press release. They’ll be the ones who redesign roles so humans do the high-judgment work, and AI clears the path.
Because the real value isn’t in the door swinging open.
It’s in the welcome, the safety, the intuition, the quiet calibration of human moments.
AI will transform work.
Not by removing humanity — but by revealing how much of work is human after all.