Why Jobs to Be Done Matters More in the Age of AI
AI is making one part of innovation easier and cheaper at scale: functional jobs. That changes what the other parts are worth.
Something has been bothering me for a while, and a presentation I sat through recently brought it into focus.
The topic was AI-powered innovation workflows: agentic tools, automated pipelines, synthetic personas, AI-generated user research. The pitch was familiar. Move faster, reduce cost, generate more concepts, test more variants, validate earlier. The automation was real. The speed gains were real. About halfway through, I noticed something missing.
There were no actual users in the process. Somewhere along the way, the conversation with a real person had been replaced by a synthetic abstraction of one. AI personas built from demographic assumptions. Behavioral models constructed from historical patterns. Simulated responses from people who do not exist.
I understand the appeal. Real users are hard to reach, slow to schedule, and inconsistent in ways that make analysis uncomfortable. Synthetic stand-ins are faster, cheaper, and available at two in the morning. The research on this is also real: a 2024 Stanford and Google DeepMind study found that AI agents built from two-hour interviews with 1,052 people replicated their subjects’ social survey responses with 85 percent accuracy. That is genuinely useful at the hypothesis-generation stage.
But there is a hard boundary. ACM Interactions research published in late 2025 puts it clearly: synthetic personas produce confident but inaccurate direction. They validate bad assumptions, confirm biases, and create blind spots. A comparative study of B2B research found that AI-generated personas showed strong positive bias compared to real respondents and followed a herd mentality that real buyers do not. The practical rule that emerges from this body of work is straightforward: synthetic research is useful for the first 80 percent of discovery. The remaining 20 percent -- the deep, situational, emotionally textured part of a decision -- still requires a real person.
That distinction is not a footnote. It sits at the center of what Jobs to Be Done is actually for.
What JTBD is really about
Jobs to Be Done is usually introduced through three dimensions, and most teams stop there.
The functional job is the practical task someone is trying to complete: file a claim, compare options, write a report, diagnose a problem. The social job is about how someone wants to be seen by others: competent, prepared, credible, not the person who missed something obvious. The emotional job is about how someone wants to feel, or avoid feeling: confident, in control, not exposed to regret, not left holding a decision they cannot defend.
These three still matter. But in the age of AI they are no longer sufficient to explain where human value remains or where competitive advantage actually sits. Two additional dimensions are becoming more strategically important, and they are the ones that automation handles worst.
The relational job is about how someone wants to be treated by another human being. Not just served -- treated. Understood. Taken seriously. Not processed. When a customer reaches a genuinely difficult moment in a decision, what they often need is not a faster answer. They need to feel that the person or organization on the other side of the transaction actually sees their situation.
The situational job is about fit to a specific context. Help me navigate my case, not the average case. Help me adapt this to my constraints, my timing, my trade-offs, my history, my risks. The average case is a statistical construct. No buyer lives there. They live in one specific company, one specific team, one specific set of pressures that the standard solution was not designed around.
These five dimensions together give a much more complete map of what progress actually means to a customer -- and they reveal something structurally important: AI is increasingly capable on the functional layer and progressively weaker as you move toward the relational and situational ones.
