Ruth Sunderland's critique of the "annoyance economy" identifies a structural problem in how organisations increasingly monetise friction: deliberately making processes harder, slower, or more irritating to extract value through premium tiers, data harvesting, or forced engagement. This model has become endemic across consumer-facing industries, from airlines charging for basic services to streaming platforms burying cancellation options. The concern is not merely that these practices frustrate customers—it's that they represent a calculated erosion of baseline service quality as a business strategy. For CX teams, this creates an immediate tension: you're tasked with improving satisfaction metrics whilst operating within systems explicitly designed to generate annoyance as a revenue lever.
The introduction of AI into this landscape amplifies the problem rather than solving it. Where human agents might exercise discretion or empathy to resolve friction, AI systems optimise for operational efficiency and cost reduction, often automating the very bottlenecks that drive annoyance. A chatbot that cannot escalate, a routing system that loops customers through irrelevant departments, or an AI that enforces rigid policies without exception—these become friction points at scale. The question for CX leaders is whether your organisation's AI roadmap (whether Agentforce, Copilot, or proprietary solutions) is genuinely designed to reduce customer effort, or whether it's being deployed primarily to reduce headcount whilst maintaining the annoyance economy's underlying structure. This distinction will determine whether AI becomes a tool for competitive differentiation or simply a more efficient mechanism for frustrating customers at lower cost.
The strategic implication is that organisations claiming to prioritise customer experience whilst operating within an annoyance-economy model face a credibility crisis. Support teams will increasingly find themselves managing customer anger that stems not from service failures but from intentional design choices made upstream. Without explicit organisational commitment to removing friction rather than optimising it, CX investments become defensive measures rather than competitive advantages—and AI adoption risks becoming the most efficient way yet to disappoint at scale.
RUTH SUNDERLAND: 'Annoyance economy' hurts us and AI will make it worse This is Money