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Tyler Handley sold Inkbox to BIC for $65 million. His new company, Olauto, sells a $33 car air freshener, launched last September, is already profitable, and has zero employees. Four people, some contractors, and AI running the back office. The one thing they refuse to automate: when a customer emails, a human answers. Every time.
The guy who built the software behind that is Mike Maleszyk, Tyler's friend since high school, who started HumanTouchCX after a support chatbot swore it was human but couldn't say what it had for lunch.
If you run CX for a Shopify brand, or you're deciding right now which parts of your business AI should touch, this episode is the two of them drawing the line in public.
Want the setup Olauto uses? HumanTouch is taking on its first 100 Founding Merchants, with white-glove onboarding and 24 months of locked pricing.
What's inside:
- Why Braden reviews every automated reply "from hi to buy," and the one automation he had to be convinced to allow (off-hours only)
- Deflection rate, and what the merchants bragging about theirs are actually counting
- Product questions as the worst place to put a bot: those customers are low funnel with a cart open
- The Inkbox moderation story: 13 to 20 CX agents, custom tattoo uploads in a gray area no AI could judge, and the customer emails that started "why do you want this?"
- Article 50 of the EU AI Act, live since August 2nd: transparency, record keeping, and audit logs for every AI touchpoint if you sell into the EU
- Tyler's vibe-coded ERP: why it hooks into Shopify and nothing else
- "Friend founding," and how four people split brand, supply chain, CX, and ads
- Hewie, the AI that helps train your first CX hire off your own past tickets instead of your calendar
Who this is for: DTC founders and CX leads between launch and $100M who are being pitched full automation from every direction.
What to steal: Braden's rule. Automations answer the 65% (shipping status) during off hours only, and a human still has eyes on every single reply before the relationship is on the line.
Timestamps:
00:00 Building an AI-powered brand without losing the human touch
05:00 Why AI customer service needs transparency
12:00 The problem with optimizing customer support for deflection
21:00 What the EU AI Act means for ecommerce brands
28:00 How a four-person team uses AI to scale an ecommerce brand
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