Vinyl, coffee and a working system. Why in the age of AI we want to touch things again

Saturday, morning coffee and a slower pace than during the week. A good moment for a text that is not about another implementation, data migration or whether a system is worth rebuilding. I want to share a thought that has stayed with me for a few days: analog in the age of AI is coming back. And it is not only about vinyl records.

It all started with Gary Vaynerchuk's article "Analog Is Back and I'm Betting On It". For years, Gary has made a living predicting where marketing is heading. This time he is not writing about a new platform or algorithm. He writes that what people can see, touch and test for themselves will matter more and more.

I read it as someone who builds software every day and works with AI. And I caught myself nodding along.

Picture someone taking a record out of its sleeve on a Saturday morning. Carefully, by the edges. They put it on the platter, lower the needle and listen to the soft crackle for a moment before the music starts.

The same person has practically all the music in the world on their phone. For free, or for a few dollars a month. No dust, no flipping the record, no shelf space.

So why choose the slower, more expensive and less convenient way?

I think the answer is simple. You cannot scroll through a vinyl record. You have to sit down, listen and pay attention. You hold something real, with weight, a smell and a history. Something no model generated in a fraction of a second.

It would be easy to dismiss this as nostalgia among a few music lovers. The numbers say otherwise.

According to RIAA data, US vinyl sales in 2025 passed 1 billion dollars for the first time since 1983. 46.8 million records were sold. As Digital Music News reports, it was the nineteenth year of growth in a row.

To be fair, paid streaming subscriptions still account for more than 55% of US recorded music revenue. Nobody is throwing their phone in a drawer. But more and more people consciously choose when they use it.

Other data paints a similar picture. As reported by the Spokesman-Review, Google searches for "analog hobbies" grew by 5,000% in a year, and for "offline living" by 850%. The same article cites a Pew Research Center survey: 53% of US adults say they spend too much time on their phones.

One observation from these sources stands out to me. People are not rejecting technology. They want to regain control over when and how they use it.

Why now? I think the answer is right there on our screens.

Over the last two years, producing a nice text, an image or even a video has stopped costing anything but a few seconds. You can see the effect in every feed. Content is correct, smooth and increasingly alike. There is a blunt name for it: "AI slop".

Gary Vaynerchuk put it even more strongly on a podcast: we are about half a decade away from not believing a single video on the internet. You may agree with him or not, but the direction is clear. If everything can be generated, what cannot be generated becomes more valuable.

You can see this in business too. In a Cvent survey, 85% of event marketers agreed that the rise of AI-generated content has made it harder to build trust. They named generic content, not the lack of face-to-face contact, as the biggest threat to trust.

A paradox? A little. The more artificially generated content there is, the more we value a real person on the other side.

I am writing this as someone who loves technology and makes a living from it. That is exactly why I see what we sometimes get wrong with it.

It was supposed to connect us, yet it often pushes us apart. Instead of a phone call we get a form. Instead of a conversation we get a chatbot that politely answers everything except our question. Instead of seeing something that works we get a presentation full of promises.

I am not saying this is bad. A form can be convenient, and a chatbot can save a lot of time. The problem starts when a tool replaces a relationship where the relationship mattered most.

You can see it clearly at weekend trainings and industry meetups. The newest AI tools are still best discussed around one table, face to face, over coffee during a break. Nobody has yet invented a better way to build trust than two people meeting.

There is one more thing in Gary's article that I liked. He writes about in-store samples, something as old as trade itself.

He gives an example from Costco. For sampling to pay off, it was enough that around 8% of the people who tried a product went on to buy it. The other 92% simply ate a free bite and moved on. And that is fine.

This is not just an anecdote. A study by Professor Kenny Herbst of Wake Forest, described by Supermarket News, found a 28% lift in a product's sales in the three weeks after a demo, compared with the three weeks before.

The mechanism is as old as the world. Before we trust, we want to try. Nobody buys cheese based only on a description in a flyer. We want to taste, see and touch.

At this point you might ask what a software house has to do with any of this. After all, we produce something you cannot hold in your hands.

That is exactly why this topic struck me. At 360 Software House we see that buying software follows the same rule as vinyl and food samples. People want something real and testable.

In our world, "analog" means a few very concrete things.

1. A conversation before anyone says "system". First we want to understand how your company works, where you lose time and what really bothers you. Technology comes later.
2. Showing instead of promising. A working solution, even a small one, says more than the nicest presentation. Ideally, you see it on your own process, not on a made-up company from a catalogue.
3. A chance to "taste" first. That is why we start with a free consultation. It is our version of a food sample. Not every one ends in working together, and that is fine. It should help you see the problem more clearly, whatever you decide later.
4. Technology that gives people their time back. When we automate processes, the goal is not to take away people's contact with each other and with customers. It is to take retyping data and manual fixes off their plate, and to give the time back for what a machine cannot do: conversation, decisions, relationships.

If you want to know how to connect processes in a company so that technology really helps people, read our article Business operating system: how to connect company processes?

I am not going to talk anyone into throwing away their smartphone and buying a turntable. I work with AI every day, and I think it is one of the most interesting things that has happened to our industry.

Still, I think the smartest companies in the coming years will be able to answer a simple question. What in our work should stay human, and what can we safely hand over to a machine?

So here is a small task for your weekend. Over coffee or your favourite record, think about this:

1. Which conversation in your company should never turn into a form?
2. Which task takes up your people's time but could run on its own?
3. When was the last time a customer could really "try" something before buying from you?

If the answer to the second question comes to mind right away, let's talk. Book a free consultation - no presentation full of promises, just a conversation about how your company really works.

And now, back to my coffee. Have a great weekend! :)