I first noticed it happening on social media.
In the early days, when you connected with someone online you actually saw their life. Their wins, their struggles, their random Tuesday afternoon thoughts. It was imperfect and unfiltered and surprisingly human.
Then the algorithms arrived.
Suddenly the platforms decided what you should see based on what would keep you scrolling longest. You could be connected to hundreds of people and never once encounter anything they posted. The connection existed on paper. In reality it had quietly evaporated.
The idea was efficiency. What was delivered was distance.
I started calling these relationships what they actually were. Efficient Strangers. People we are technically connected to but don’t actually know. People we’ve optimized our way out of genuine relationship with.
And then I realized social media was just the beginning.
We did the same thing to email. To meetings. To networking events. To every form of human interaction we could get our hands on. We automated the outreach. We templated the follow up. We tracked the touchpoints and measured the engagement and wondered why nobody trusted us anymore.
We didn’t just build Efficient Strangers into our technology. We built them into our culture.
Here’s what concerns me most. We are now entering the age of artificial intelligence, where every interaction can be further optimized, further scaled, further removed from genuine human presence. AI can write your emails, schedule your calls, analyze your relationships, and suggest the perfect moment to reach out to a contact you haven’t spoken to in two years.
All of it efficient. None of it human.
Human Interaction, what I call H.I., is fast becoming the scarcest resource in business. Not data. Not technology. Not capital. The ability to actually show up for another person and mean it is becoming genuinely rare.
And rare things become valuable.
The people I see winning right now in business, in leadership, in life, are not the most automated. They are the most connected. Not in the follower count sense. Actually connected. In the inconvenient, time consuming, remember what matters to you kind of way.
I describe these people as a Deliberate Human.
A Deliberate Human doesn’t stumble into relationships accidentally. They make conscious choices about how they show up for people. They invest before they need anything. They remember names, notice struggles, celebrate wins that have nothing to do with them. They treat human connection not as a networking strategy but as a way of moving through the world.
In a world obsessed with efficiency, being a Deliberate Human is almost a radical act.
The Efficient Stranger asks: what is the fastest way to maintain this relationship?
The Deliberate Human asks: what does this person actually need from me right now?
Those are different questions. They produce different relationships. And over the course of a career they build completely different lives.
The algorithm optimized us away from each other. The question now is whether we have the awareness and the will to choose our way back.
I’m still figuring out how to do this myself. But I know it starts with noticing what we’ve lost.
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Thom Singer, CSP is a keynote speaker, author, and the originator of the “Efficient Strangers” concept. For more than two decades he has delivered over a thousand presentations to companies, conferences, and law firms on the topics of Human Interaction (H.I.), business relationships, and trust. He believes that in a world racing toward artificial intelligence, the ability to show up as a “Deliberate Human” is the most underrated competitive advantage in business. He is the host of the Making Waves at C-Level podcast and is currently writing his next book. He lives in Austin, Texas. He can be booked to speak at your conferences directly or via several speakers bureaus.
Thom Singer is also the CEO at the Austin Technology Council.
I’m writing a book on this. If the idea of Efficient Strangers and being a Deliberate Human resonates with you, I’d genuinely like to hear where you’re seeing it show up in your world.