Be polite to your AI bot. It has nothing to do with the bot.

Do you say “please” and “thank you” to your bot?

Apparently, most of us do.

A recent Fortune study found that nearly 80% of UK and US users say “please” and “thank you” when talking to ChatGPT and other AI platforms. And when asked why, the most common answer was simply: because it’s the right thing to do.

Those “pleases” and “thank-yous” may be the world’s most expensive.

But as the AI discussion rages around us, at Noblahblah, we believe the “please” and “thank you” instinct is your superpower. We call it being Dangerously Nice. Politeness, it turns out, is your competitive advantage in a world where collaboration is everything.

The world’s most expensive “please”

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has done the math. All those “pleases” and “thank yous” cost OpenAI tens of millions of dollars a year in computing power. Every extra word is a token. Every token costs electricity. Multiply that by hundreds of millions of users and you have, apparently, the world’s most expensive etiquette lesson.

He calls it “tens of millions of dollars well spent.”

We’re taking the liberty to park the energy usage discussion for the moment and focus on the core value of that polite interaction.

Manners for a machine that doesn’t care

The bot doesn’t need our manners. It has no feelings to hurt, no sense of being taken for granted.

So why do we do it? Because courtesy isn’t really about the other party. It’s about who we are when we show up.

Stanford researchers found back in 1996 that people were polite to computers the same way they were polite to people. The machine didn’t change. The human did. Something in us reaches for grace almost automatically, even when there is no social consequence for skipping it.

Courtesy is a doorway virtue. It opens the space where humility, generosity, patience, courage, and honesty can actually do their work.

That instinct is worth protecting.

The quiet engine of everything worth building

Here is what I have come to believe after years of working with speakers, leaders and professionals of all kinds.

The people who build the best things, the best teams, the best presentations, the best relationships, are not the ones who treat interactions as a transaction. They are the ones who walk into a room, or open a conversation, with a quiet assumption of cooperation.

Not naivety. Not weakness. Cooperation.

The most energising, productive and rewarding moments in professional life, and life in general, happen when people are building something together. When there is generosity in the room. When someone says, in effect: I am not here to win this exchange. I am here to make something with you.

That spirit has a name in older traditions. It sits somewhere between generosity and humility, two of the virtues that have never gone out of fashion.

Their opposites, greed and excessive pride, are easy to spot. The leader who makes every story about their own brilliance. The speaker whose slides are a monument to their own judgment. The communicator so focused on impression management that genuine connection never really happens.

The room goes cold fast

Those rooms go cold fast. Cooperation, on the other hand, creates ripples.

• One generous act of listening produces a better question.
• A better question produces a more honest answer.
• A more honest answer builds trust.
• Trust opens doors that ego keeps firmly shut.

This is not soft thinking. It is how real influence works. It can start remarkably small. A please. A thank you. A moment of genuine attention before you launch into your point.

Dangerously Nice: the science backs it up

The science backs this up. A peer-reviewed neuroscience study, “Perceiving Active Listening Activates the Reward System and Improves the Impression of Relevant Experiences” (PubMed Central, 2014), found that people were significantly more willing to cooperate with someone who had actively listened to them, and that listening triggers the brain’s reward system, building rapport and trust almost automatically.

A major academic review, “The Power of Listening at Work” (ResearchGate, 2022), confirmed that active listening is a likely cause of better relationships, higher trust and stronger collaboration across teams and at every level of leadership.

Three small moves

Today, the AI news, headlines, warnings and speculation are flying around our heads, with threats to our jobs, autonomy, agency and more. In the midst of that maelstrom, here are a few ideas to create connection in your next meeting, conversation or presentation.

1. Open with a question, not a statement. Ask something real. Not a rhetorical warm-up. A genuine question you don’t already know the answer to. It signals cooperation from the first breath.
2. Find the “we” in your story. Many stories are told in the first person singular. Try reframing one of yours around what the team discovered, what the client taught you, what went better because someone else was in the room. Generosity in storytelling is magnetic.
3. Say thank you out loud, to a person. Not by email. Not by text. In a room, or on a call, specifically and without rushing. Notice what it does to the atmosphere. Courtesy is not decoration. It is the opening move of good collaboration.

What’s your value in a world of AI?

Back to our bot. The “please” and “thank you” we offer your AI assistant will not make it work harder. It will not feel appreciated. It will not remember our kindness next time.

But we will.

The habit of showing up with grace, even when no one is watching, even when the machine doesn’t care, is the habit that can make us worth listening to and working with when it counts.

There is a saying that democracy dies in darkness. In a similar vein, maybe our collaboration and the value we bring to the table, dies in ego.

Maybe “please” and “thank you” are the superpowers we bring to the game.

It’s the instinct that says: I am here to build something with you, not at you. Something we build together, with the joy and rewards that cooperation can bring. And it’s the right thing to do.

That is where we can talk to each other, connect with each other, and build things together, with no blah blah.

By Howard Lettinga