08 Sep When Your Onboarding Email Feels Like Breakup Text from a Bot

I recently signed up for a promising program, nothing earth-shattering, just a professional service I’d been eyeing for a while. The sales call went great. The offering made sense. I was really excited to receive the details and get started. But then the “much-awaited” onboarding email landed.

And just like that, my enthusiasm did a dramatic nosedive.

You know the kind of email I’m talking about; the one that reads like it’s been churned out of the same AI sausage factory that’s been serving half of the Internet lately. It was overly polished, crammed with generic “value-driven” phrases, and written with zero emotional intelligence but peppered with a thousand emojis. The kind of email that tries so hard to sound personal that it ends up sounding like it was written by a robot who once read about human feelings in a PDF.

It hurt.

Not because the copy was bad (it wasn’t). Not because I hate AI (I don’t anymore. This is a character development story, stay with me). It hurt because it felt like no one cared enough to write to me, a client who was super excited about getting into the program and was expecting the same enthusiasm from the provider. Is that too much to ask for? 

As a marketing professional and a copywriter, this stung a little extra. 

Just a few days ago, I lost my way and stumbled upon LinkedIn, and a few posts caught my eye. They were discussing how writing with AI is becoming the new cool. And it made me pause.

Reading those posts took me down a quiet lane of nostalgia. I remember starting my first job in September 2013 as a content writer. It was such a different world! We’d dig deep, scavenging forums for information, bookmarking ten thousand million blogs, reading for hours just to write a few lines with meaning. Titles weren’t AI-generated templates; they were little poems we crafted, fighting for every word.

There was something satisfying about building a piece from nothing. It was like unlocking your brain to chase a trend, shape an idea, or birth an insight. I used to write atleast three solid pieces in a day with no prompts, no shortcuts. It was just the kind of focus and flow that made work feel like creation, not execution. I miss that. I miss how much we learned while writing, how personal the craft felt. Maybe we were slower, perhaps not always smarter, but weren’t we a little more in it? Weren’t we happier? Also, the engagement rates were not just numbers. They were genuine, real clients taking notice of every detail mentioned in a piece of copy. 

I’ll admit, I was one of those people who rolled their eyes at using ChatGPT. It felt like cheating. Like I was skipping the hard, messy, rewarding part of the process. Writing copy with AI felt like blasphemy for a long time. Then I met burnout. And blank Google Docs stared at me with judgment. Slowly, I started using AI for ideation, outlining, battling writer’s block, and I’ll admit, it’s a damn good assistant.

But here’s the thing: I use it. I don’t become it. And therein lies the problem.

Somewhere along the way, we confused efficiency with connection. AI is being used not just to make the work smoother, but to do the connecting for us. It’s writing newsletters, pitch decks, customer emails, and sliding into DMs. Imagine outsourcing that kind of intimacy! I mean, what next? AI-generated birthday wishes for your grandma? Oh, but somewhere, someone is already doing that too.

I get it. We’re all overwhelmed. AI saves time. But connection, real connection, isn’t scalable, and it’s not supposed to be. A simple, human “Hey, we’re so glad you’re here. We’ve got your back,” from a real person is what makes a customer talk about your brand even before you deliver results.

That onboarding email I received felt like a missed opportunity. It said, “We value you,” but it showed me that I was just one more checkbox in an automated sequence.

So, is AI the future?

Sure. How we choose to use it determines what kind of future we’re building. One where we’re efficient and emotionally intelligent, or one where we’ve all turned into cold, polite customer service bots who say “Thank you for reaching out” with dead eyes and zero soul. The best welcome emails aren’t perfect. They’re human. And that’s what I was craving all along. And please, can we ditch the emojis? Whose idea was that, anyway?

Let AI write your outlines. Let it brainstorm 10 subject lines. Let it give you a push when the copy well runs dry at 2 AM. However, don’t let it take away your zeal for thinking and building connections. 

The future of customer service and marketing is not just tech-enabled. It’s human-first. And no algorithm can ever replace the feeling of being seen.