I looked at my MCP connections and realized which companies survive the AI shift — and which don't.

At softly, we tried to automate customer support for clinics. The AI part worked — FAQs, multi-step lookups, even reasoning about clinic policies. The support part didn't.

People don't message a clinic to ask what's on the website. They want someone who knows the things the website doesn't say — can this procedure fix my specific case, will it hurt more than last time, if I'm combining two procedures which order matters — and who can solve their problem right now.

Each question is an edge case. Getting one wrong isn't just bad service — a hallucinated answer about a procedure is dangerous. Generalization and hallucination come from the same place.

But even accurate answers weren't enough. The job was conversion — turning that anxious inquiry into a patient who actually walks through the door. Every rule we wrote implied ten more we hadn't thought to write. The gap never closed.

Coding agents already ship features^[1]. Design tools generate layouts from prompts. Customer support looks like the obvious next step — text-based work, recognizable patterns^[2]. In 2011, Gartner predicted that by 2020, customers would manage 85% of their relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human^[3]. Fifteen years later, the job still exists.

In mid-2022, I typed a prompt into platform.openai.com and got back something that didn't feel like a demo.

It was text-davinci-002. Before ChatGPT, before the hype. But it wasn't the output that mattered. It was the feeling: this is going to break everything we know about building AI products.

Building a good AI model meant collecting data, training, and fine-tuning for specific tasks. Hard, slow, expensive work. Davinci-002 could do a rough version of most of it with just a prompt — plain English, no data, no training, no cost.

My co-founders and I were already building softly, an AI startup. A few months later, ChatGPT launched and everyone else felt it too.

Our team has joined HealingPaper — known as 강남언니 (UNNI) in Korea. I'm leading AI product. Here's what we learned getting here.