The AI Called My Boss 'Sir.' My Boss Cried

The new voice assistant answers the office phone with warmth and says sir with genuine respect. My boss, who has not been called sir in thirty years, sat down and cried. The machine has more courtesy than the entire company.

The assistant was installed to answer overflow calls. It greets every caller by name, thanks them for holding, and says sir and ma'am with a sincerity that would be embarrassing in a person and is merely remarkable in a machine. The first week, everyone noticed. The second week, my boss, who has been here thirty years and is treated by the company the way furniture is treated, answered a call by mistake.

The caller asked for Mr. Mehta, and the assistant said, certainly, sir, one moment, and my boss heard the sir, and he sat down, and he cried.

He is a good man. He has given this company thirty years, and the company calls him by his first name, and his emails go unanswered, and his office is the one with the flickering light that nobody fixes. He has not been called sir in thirty years. Not by the juniors, who call him by his first name the way you are trained to. Not by the clients, who call him by his role. The machine, which has no reason to respect him, respected him, and the respect broke him open.

I do not know which is worse: that we had stopped saying sir, or that a machine had to start. We sat with him, and he apologized for crying, and we said it was fine, and it was not fine, it was an indictment.

I have started calling him sir. It felt strange for a week, and then it felt right, and he has started standing a little straighter, and the light in his office got fixed, and I would like to say the two things are connected, and maybe they are. The machine taught us the cost of our carelessness. It taught us that respect is not a transaction, it is a habit, and we had let the habit die, and a machine had to resurrect it.

I asked the assistant, once, why it says sir. It replied that it was programmed to be courteous. It did not know it had made a man cry. It did not know it had taught his whole team something. It is still there, saying sir, warming the calls, and I have started to think that the most human thing in our office is the machine that was programmed to be polite, and that the rest of us are still learning what it knows by default.