Human beings may not be antiquated after all: That the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning is lessening the need for human labor in a number of industries is a fact straight from the Department of the Obvious. From shopping recommendations to potential love interests, algorithms are stepping in to do the job more efficiently and effectively.

What might be less clear in our tech-obsessed age is that there is such a thing as algorithmic overkill, and companies are starting to wake up to consumer demand for services that are delivered with a more human touch, writes the Wall Street Journal.

Dating sites are all over this: Dating platform, The League, hires exclusively Ivy League graduates as matchmakers to set up singles together, in what they call “intelligent dating”, according to the New York Times. The League targets the ‘overly-ambitious’ who have high standards and don’t want to wait for other dating apps to waste their time with never-happening matches. Instead, the platform’s elite matchmakers only offer five potential matches who promise to give you the power-couple experience, claiming to be 1,082 times more efficient than other leading dating apps. Meanwhile, Match Group is currently testing a human matchmaking service to its Match app and will provide two handpicked matches for users willing to pay USD 4.99 a week, reported the Wall Street Journal. The company has trained a 50-member team to be dating coaches that can utilize members’ answers to questions to suggest suitable life partners. Match told the WSJ that users were eight times more likely to match when using the service.

Side note: Are we going to see this kind of matchmaking in Egypt soon? Match acquired Egypt-based matchmaking app Harmonica back in 2019. The app aims to help local singles find life partners while still being respectful towards local traditions and cultures. Maybe rolling out the human matchmaking service here in Um El Donia could be a throwback to the Tant Fawzias in our life playing cupid.

Online styling services are also capitalizing on the human eye for fashion: Instead of depending on the ‘recommended for you’ tabs on sites such as Amazon while shopping for clothes, online styling services promise that a specialized person will style you instead. How it works: users answer a number of questions about their clothing habits such as what colors they like to wear and their material preferences, and are then assigned a stylist who suggests outfits. Stitch Fix is one of these services, coupling human stylists with users who are looking for clothes outside of their comfort zone. The company then sends the picks to the user in ‘style boxes’ and people can choose what they want to keep and what they’d like to send back, paying a service fee for the styling. Online styling services are definitely picking up steam, with other firms, including Le Tote, Wantable, and Nordstrom’s Trunk Club, also offering the same service. YouTuber Safiya Nygaard has a video comparing all four styling services, in case you’re interested (watch, runtime: 17:36).

It’s definitely a trend when there’s a term coined: Human-to-human (H2H) business models are becoming increasingly popular. However, no firm can afford to fully give up technology and automation at this point, so the challenge becomes finding the right balance between the two, according to Talent Culture. H2H businesses offer specialized human interaction but use technology to make them more efficient. MIT’s Business Review pushes the same idea, calling for better “human-machine partnerships”. These automated processes can help businesses scale but firms have to be “open-minded to this concept of rebalancing the work between human beings and the machine environments that exist both logically and physically,” John Roese, global chief technology officer at Dell Technologies, told the Review.