Why AI will never replace a good relationship…

I was talking to someone recently who told me AI will soon build better relationships than humans. Not help with them. Actually build them. And I get why people think that. AI doesn’t get tired, or moody, or stressed. It doesn’t bring baggage from one conversation into the next. If all you needed for a strong relationship was consistency, then yes, the idea starts to make sense. The reason we started Coordinated Solutions is because we know it won’t.

Later that day I ended up in the supermarket, standing between the staffed tills and the self checkouts, and thought more about it.

The self checkout gives you the same experience every time. Scan, bag, pay, done. It’s predictable. It’s quick. It doesn’t judge you for buying biscuits at 9am. And the numbers show people love that predictability. Roughly 73% of shoppers now say they prefer self checkout. Around 79% use it regularly. When the task is simple and you just want to get on with your day, the consistency feels reassuring.

But that consistency comes from the fact it has no inner world. No mood. No tiredness. No stress leaking out from earlier in the day. No awkwardness. No warmth either. Just the script.

Then you look over at the human checkout. That’s where you see what AI and self checkouts both lack. You get the person who makes you smile. You get the person who looks like they’re running on empty. You get someone who’s distracted, someone who’s proud of their work, someone who’s having a good day or a rough one. Each interaction changes because the human behind it changes. Not necessarily in a dramatic way, but in the small human ways we all recognise.

And interestingly, not everyone likes the predictable version. Booths, the UK supermarket, removed almost all their self checkouts and brought staff back in. Their customer satisfaction score went up afterwards. People said they simply preferred dealing with a human again.

This is the bit AI can’t touch. A machine can give you a flawless interaction. It can never give you a human one.

And when you move from supermarkets to project delivery, this difference becomes far more obvious.

Projects don’t fall over because a process was slightly wrong. They fall over because people misunderstand each other, avoid difficult conversations, or lose trust. Research shows poor communication is the biggest reason projects fail. More than planning. More than tools. More than methodology. It’s the relationship side that breaks first.

You see this pattern clearly in some of the project horror stories!

Take Police Scotland’s i6 system. On paper, it was a strong idea: replace more than a hundred legacy systems and save over £200 million. But the whole thing collapsed. Not because the technology was impossible, but because the trust between the Scottish Police Authority and Accenture eroded to the point where they couldn’t agree on what the programme actually needed to deliver. Audit Scotland summed it up plainly: the programme fell apart due to poor communication, broken trust and misaligned expectations.

The National Programme for IT in the NHS is another example on a bigger scale. One of the most ambitious public sector IT projects ever attempted. And yet it was set up in an adversarial way from the start. Fixed-price contracts. Punitive clauses. A culture of protecting commercial interests rather than working together. Billions were spent, systems didn’t fit, disputes exploded, and the National Audit Office called it one of the biggest contracting failures in the public sector. Again, the technology didn’t fail first. The relationships did.

HS2’s Euston redevelopment tells the same story. Multiple partners, all with overlapping interests, none of them really aligned. At one point Network Rail wouldn’t even take HS2’s calls. When the relationships became hostile, progress stopped. Not because engineers didn’t know what to do, but because no one could work together long enough to do it.

And then there’s Olkiluoto 3 in Finland. A next-generation nuclear reactor that should’ve been a showcase of European engineering. Instead, it became a decade-long saga of mistrust, legal defensiveness and misalignment. Costs quadrupled. Delivery slipped by more than ten years. By the end, the two main partners could barely speak to each other. When communication becomes procedural and defensive, you’re not building anything together anymore. You’re just trying to protect yourself.

All of these examples show the same basic truth:
technology rarely breaks first — relationships do.

Which brings me back to AI.

AI feels attractive because it looks like the self checkout version of relationships. Clean. Predictable. Never off its game. Always polite. Always steady. And for simple tasks - summarising a meeting, drafting a message, spotting patterns - it’s brilliant. It can make your life easier. It can give you clarity. It can remove noise. It can support the relationship work.

But it will never build relationships

Relationships live in the unpredictable, slightly messy parts of human behaviour. The moments where someone hesitates before they speak. The feeling when a room goes tense. The shift in tone when someone is worried about saying the wrong thing. The days when someone needs patience more than a process. The small pauses. The awkward silences. The instinct to check in when someone seems off. The courage to repair something after a misunderstanding.

Machines don’t experience any of that. Humans do, because we’re wired for it.

So when someone tells me AI will soon build stronger relationships than people, I think of those self checkouts and those failed programmes. The machine gives you consistency. But only humans give you connection, context, and the ability to navigate the full emotional landscape of working with other people.

Projects are delivered by people for people. And connection is the thing that carries them forward.