Has Human Language Disappeared in Content?

Scott: Hello and thanks for joining me today. This is your human content brief. A report on what's happening in the world of content strategy from a human perspective. Today's briefing includes a report on evidence of robotic and generic marketing language coming from people who claim to believe in keeping content human, a shocking and disappointing revelation from marketers and their goals for the year.

A closer look on what conversion means to you and your audience. Sabrina Amjad from Van Bree Consulting is going to be here with some insight on how AI is helping and hurting businesses right now. And finally, we'll look at how AI might help you gain better emotional intelligence. Yep, you heard that right?

But before we get started today, I wanted to let you know that my book, undeniably Human Content, is now available on Amazon in paperback ebook and audiobook. This is my first book and I had to get all versions of the book out and now they are all available. And it was quite the experience learning how all this is done because the whole audiobook process is very different from the others.

And it was approved just recently. So it's all available. And again, if you don't know, it shows you how to create humanized content or evolve existing content to be more human using the stamp framework and all of the insights you hear in the human content brief will be tied to that framework in some way.

So that's going to be self-awareness, two-way communication, adaptability, meaningful language and predictive intelligence. So with that in mind, let's get started on page one. This comes from Christopher Penn, the co-founder and chief data scientist of Trust Insights, and obviously the co-host of Marketing Over Coffee.

If you listen to that podcast, you've probably seen an insight or two from him over the years. So he wrote this recently on LinkedIn. Here we go. He says, so. Let's talk about people arguing about M Dashes chat, GPT, and spotting AI generated content. I did a little experiment. I took the last five people on my feed who had posts like that about how AI can never replace the craft of marketing.

AI can't write like humans, et cetera. Senior marketers and thought leaders, and I went to their profiles and I went to their company profiles. I found the company's taglines in the About tab, and here's what these companies say about themselves, presumably written by their passionate, human led, craft focused senior marketers.

I kid you not. We partner with global brands to accelerate growth and profitability. We deliver trusted insights for what's ahead. We unite a diverse portfolio of companies to deliver a full spectrum of services fueled by data-driven insights. We are the first platform backed by experts to deliver a remarkable track record of success.

We are the leading turnkey solution for infrastructure management backed by a big pile of investor names. This is slop, not AI generated slop. Human generated slop. This is the output of the craft that the marketers are so ardently defending against ai. This is what you produce as you rail against chat, GPT and m dashes chat.

GPT isn't ruining the craft for an awful lot of marketing humans did that just find themselves producing slop like this. Hell, Chad. GPT slop is probably an improvement on this. This is why AI is going to consume a lot of marketing jobs. If I'm a stakeholder needing to cut costs because who isn't these days and I can get mediocre slot from humans for thousands of dollars per month, or I can get mediocre slot from machines for tens of dollars per month, this is a no brainer.

Clearly, as a marketing leader, if these are my company taglines, I'm fully committed to corporate slop, so quality is off the table, the craft is off the table. Of the four dimensions we care about scale, quality, speed, and cost. If I don't care about quality, then AI wins the rest. Hands down. If we don't want AI to consume our jobs, then priority one has to be refocusing away from M dashes and delves on whether or not the human led work we're already doing sucks.

If what we do sucks, if what we create is slop. Then the ugly reality is that our work is completely replaceable by machine, and the machines will do it better, faster, and cheaper. Yeah. There's so much to unpack here. I mean, one of the first pieces of advice I saw when the arguments really started to push back a little more on, okay, let's, let's wait a second here and let's start figuring out ways that humans can work with AI while acknowledging the impact AI is going to have on our industry.

The first thing that I saw people talking about was, okay, if copywriters and content producers want to keep their job, they're gonna have to do a better job, they're almost gonna have to re-skill, or you're gonna have to have consultants come in that know how to really amplify that humanized element in content or in copy in order for people to know how to write that and then incorporate that into the work that AI is doing.

The other thing that I find really interesting about this, and this has everything to do with internal language and what it means, which inevitably impacts our external language and then our consumers trying to figure out what that means. It's possible you've worked in a company that said it was very customer-centric.

It was a buzzword all over the company. We're very customer-centric, right? And maybe everybody knew that. It's also possible within that same culture that they couldn't really tell you what that meant and the company never really defined what that meant. Or maybe you saw examples as to how they weren't customer centric.

They just said they were. In fact, I want to say, and I, and I'll, if I can find this, I'll see if I can track it down. I found a story a few months ago. That was already kind of looking into this, and it was this, this company that had made this huge announcement. It was like this branding announcement and it was big internally and externally, and it was about how everything they did now was gonna be focused on the customer.

But the analysis showed that there was really no defining what that meant. It was just this announcement that this is what we're going to be. Nobody could really understand what that meant. It was just a thing that, I guess internally the, uh, leadership just wanted it to be something they could feel proud of just saying, because nobody could really talk about what that meant, including the people within the company.

And in a way, that's what Christopher's talking about here. You know, we've got a lot of people that said, yes, we believe humans are a big part of marketing, but again, the results. What the, the proof of what's in all this is showing, yes, humans are still there, they're still involved, but they're not writing in a way that's consistent as to what they say is important in marketing.

And that's that human element, because this copy isn't written like a human being, you know, like one human being would talk to another, and it's definitely not going to be written in a way that, uh, differentiates itself from what AI can do. That's a really good point. I mean, this is a big part of the self-awareness element of it.

We have to be aware of this. We not only have to be aware of, you know what we really define ourselves as an organization and how we approach our communications with our audience when it comes to marketing, but there also has to be evidence that we do what we say we're going to do. There are so many examples in content marketing, and Christopher just basically showed us some more.

Where emails, social media, copy, blogs, and any number of other types of content, including website copy that are written in ways that we would never communicate that way if we were in front of our consumer face-to-face, because it would sound weird. People would look at us like. What are we talking about?

You know? And we would have the self-awareness to know that if we stepped in front of them and talked to them, like we just wrote that email, that it would instantly create a disconnect. So we need to start asking ourselves, why are we so comfortable writing that way? And inevitably, that's what's gonna differentiate us from ai.

It was something that could differentiate us even before AI came into play because consumers were saying years ago they were tired of brands talking to them like they were numbers and brands talking to them like corporate marketers instead of people that are just trying to help them. Alright, page two.

Well Rand Fishkin is not happy. In fact, he says he is grumpy. Why is that? Well. The main reason is because there was a recent survey that came out from HubSpot in which 60% of marketers said increasing website traffic is their number one goal this year, 2025. And you know, I have to tell you, this really doesn't surprise me a whole lot.

I don't think it surprises Rand a whole lot, but that doesn't make it any better. Um, and part of it's because I think about the adaptability factor in my book, which talked about, um, the inability to evolve at the times. And one complete section was focused on what I just basically called the cult of SEO.

And part of this is because there are people that have hung on to really old SEO search. Concepts for years and years and years, and many of them are still holding onto 'em. And we're talking about strategies from many years ago, like back when I got my first digital marketing job. You know, that's when Rand was making all those videos when he worked for Google and was teaching us all these little, you know, ways to map out how we were going to incorporate SEO and keywords and content and have it generate traffic and how Google was gonna interpret it and what it all means.

People still think that's the way it works. I called it a cult because I feel like that sometimes if you suggest to somebody who has held onto this belief that SEO is still like this for so long, and you suggest that it's changed, it doesn't work that way anymore. I swear sometimes I get reactions from people.

Like I said, the earth was flat. Or that diehard wasn't a Christmas movie or something like that. Just something that just really rattles people and gets them talking. So Rand is explaining in this video that I'm gonna play for you here, this clip from this video where he's talking about why this is a problem and I think Rand puts it best himself.

Rand: This, this does not make me happy. This is very concerning. Uh, here is a survey from good folks at HubSpot. Of 211, senior marketing leaders and 107 marketing practitioners, uh, done this year. So 318 total people, 60% of whom said that their top website priority for the next year is increasing traffic.

Friends, I, I don't know how to make this message more clear to you. Traffic opportunity is dropping dramatically. It has been dropping the last four years. Traffic is a vanity metric growing. It is unlikely to help your business compared to many other marketing things you could do if your boss, your team, your client is telling you that you need to drive more traffic to the website.

You need to have the hard conversation with them about why that is both much more challenging than it's ever been in the past, and much le less likely to produce the kinds of bottom line results that you want. You cannot be measuring the success of your job based on overall traffic growth, lead generation conversion rates.

Those are fine search engine result ranking. For a variety of zero click reasons, probably much less useful. Landing and product page views are not a terrible metric. Weirdly. Weirdly, this is a fine metric in my opinion because I believe that all the brand things that you're gonna do at the top of the marketing funnel, right, be in the places where your audience pays attention, even if you're not driving the click back to your website.

That should drive the right people back to your landing and product pages. Let's, let's just walk through a little example together. So imagine that you're in the real estate industry, right? And, and so you're trying to attract home buyers to your website, and then they're gonna use your software or your products or whatever to, to, um, buy their house.

So, steps to take when buying house is frequent. Search done here. And look, you know, thi this is just, this is not, this is gonna answer the user's search query very comprehensively and. Then it's gonna take you to YouTube where you can watch a, a, a clever video right about this. And it is not gonna send traffic to your website, whether you're NerdWallet or Investopedia or Business Insider.

And if you're a private company that tho those publishers right, are taking the traffic and so is Reddit, right? Which is a very popular place. In fact, I looked for people who search for first time home buyer in Spark, Toro. And you can see, you can see what's going on. First off, diminishing search demand over time.

Second, these people are in, uh, platforms like, like Reddit, where millions of people are going and consuming content on the platform. They are not gonna go to your website, driving traffic to your site versus being a helpful, useful resource. In these places, right? Contributing to these subreddits, potentially starting your own, uh, getting into those YouTube channels, right?

Getting mentioned by those folks, advertising in those places, like those are gonna bring you the brand attention that you used to get from just publishing on your site and getting the traffic to your own domain. And it, it worries me a lot to see traffic growth and increasing traffic as, as the metrics and the goals.

That was a reasonable thing to do 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago, but this is 2025 friends. This is, we're living in a zero click universe.

Scott: Really what's happening here is versus trying to figure out ways to get clicks, which are generating business results and having some of these vanity metrics to really justify what we're doing on the content front.

Now we're working more on focusing on conversions, leads, and revenue, and we're doing that by engaging. Audiences across platforms. So as opposed to focusing on clicks and search and getting to our website, we're now trying to get in front of people where they are at that time. Maybe it's YouTube, maybe it's Reddit, places like that.

So really, for better context, let me read this really good post from John Jantz here from Duct Tape Marketing. He said, ever since websites became a thing, marketers, including me, have professed this rule. Never build your business on rented land. And the advice was simple. Focus on your website, your email list, what you own.

But after a conversation with my friend Andy Crestodina, I have to say, I think it's time to rethink that mantra. AI is changing pretty much everything. Search, discovery and buying behavior are all shifting where the customer and the AI bots are spending their time. Today, the real action often happens on platforms you don't own.

If you want to stay relevant, here are a couple of ways to start thinking about building real assets on rented land. Start a LinkedIn newsletter. Don't just post. Create a reoccurring publication that shows up directly in your audience's inbox on the platform where they are already active. You'll build community authority and reach with zero friction.

Launch a YouTube shorts or Instagram reel series. Short form video is sur is surfacing in search results and AI summaries. Just like we saw Rand talk about. If you have insights or stories to share, put them where both people and algorithms are looking for answers. Host regular live sessions or AMAs in LinkedIn groups or industry-specific communities.

Don't wait for people to come to your site. Meet them in digital spaces where conversations are happening now, optimize your brand's presence for AI-powered search features. Update your Google business profile and publish there. Contribute answers on forums and provide clear, useful content where AI bots put their info.

The point is simple. If your audience and the algorithms are on rented land, ignoring it is a missed opportunity. I'm not saying abandon your website or list, but in an AI world, the best marketers will build influence, trust, and even conversion opportunities everywhere. Customers are already paying attention, time to plant your flag in new places.

So Andy actually responded to this and said, if you wanted another reason why it makes sense to build an audience on LinkedIn and YouTube. Notice how blog comments on company websites are completely dead. Conversations don't happen there anymore. It happens here, not there. I mean, he's, he's right. When was the last time you landed on a blog on a website and saw a bunch of comments?

I feel like over time, one of the reasons why blog comments died outside of just changes in what's going on out there is, you know, it's, it's kind of like when you see social media platforms say, uh, we're, we don't want you asking people to comment. We want that to happen naturally. In fact, I think LinkedIn said if you do that kind of thing, we're going to make sure that people, less people see it.

Because the impression is you're asking for that because of the benefit to you. It just implies that you know, Hey, comment below because you want people to. Increase your visibility, but that's not why people want to comment. Right. You know, they're not doing it to help you per se. I mean, there might be some people that do that, maybe in the back of their mind, maybe they like you and they think, well, I'll, I have something to say and I'll help them too.

But when it became kind of a thing that everybody wanted, 'cause you know, you start seeing all those blogs on the website where they would say, comment below with your thoughts. I never really thought while we're talking about thoughts, um, that, that they really wanted it. I mean, did you ever think. That when you saw that after reading a blog, an article, and they said, share your thoughts below.

Did you ever really think they wanted that or did you think, you know, of course they want me to comment below because that that looks good on them. You know, do they really care what I think about this? Some of them might have, but you know, you can't help but question that, especially as it became more apparent.

And of course as we do in marketing, everybody starts copying off one another. It's like, oh, well the thing to do at the end of every blog is say, leave your thoughts below. Even if it might be something that there's really not anything to say something about. It's just something you write at the end of blogs and then became less meaningful.

So I find it interesting that, you know, now we're, we're really starting to notice where people do wanna have conversations. But again, even if it's. Uh, YouTube or some of the places we've talked about, the content still has to be good enough on its own to generate conversations. And I think that's something to, uh, remember as you start rerouting your content objectives for this year and moving forward about where you're gonna place your content and what you hope to get out of it.

All right, page three.

Speaking of Andy Crestodina. He recently sat down and talked with Matt Cornelison of Fungi Media, and during the interview he said this,

Andy: Conversion is not about what you wanna tell them. It's about what they came to find out. And if they don't see it, guess what? A hundred percent of websites a back button, they can go back to their previous source and there's a million options.

Right? The main reason you have a visitor is because there's a human in the world with an information need. Yeah. In front of a browser. Did you or did you not meet that person's information needs? Did you align with their emotions and considerations in the moment or not right? Did you support your claims with evidence or not?

That's really why people do and and don't take action on pages.

Scott: So I love what Andy said right out front here, where he says, you know, conversion is not rooted in what you want to tell them. And then goes on to explain the difference and the options and their reactions that people are likely going to have.

That we have to remember as marketers. That's why a big part of the stamp method involves predictive intelligence. But another thing that we can think about here is our internal language. In fact, I asked Andy on this post, I said, you know, I love this line that you said conversion is not about what you want to tell them.

And I said, so here's my question for you. I said, do you think people should consider dropping the word conversion from their marketing vocabulary and getting into the wrong mindset? The word itself seems rooted in making sure we are telling people the right things to get them to do what we want 'em to do, or to think the way we want 'em to.

And perhaps we need to replace the term with something that focuses more on meeting that need that he talked about. And Andy wrote back and said, Scott, that's a fun question. I do think the con word conversion fits because the descriptor for the person changes. They changed from a visitor into a lead or a customer for e-commerce or a donor for nonprofits, et cetera.

So the best word for that change converted works for me. What else would it be? Transform, completed, acted, which I thought was, was, uh, a really good question himself there. So what I said was, maybe instead of conversion, maybe instead of talking conversion. As we develop these ideas or strategies of what we're hoping we're able to do for the consumer and get them to do what as a business we want them to do, maybe it's validation.

Maybe validation is a better word, because if they acted, you know, if they did the thing we wanted 'em to do, they've validated that we met their. Something like that just sounds to me more positive and might even put us in a better mindset to ensure that we're focused on not approaching something like conversion with the wrong mindset and sabotaging what we're trying to do from the get go.

Because our frame of mind as far as what we're trying to do and how we're framing it, is already kind of flawed, you know? And there's so much of this, and I've talked about this before. Because I think it's something we really should consider as content marketers, or at least, you know, as part of a content strategy.

Because if you think about it, you know, you have, um, people like Tony Robbins who do this kind of stuff all the time. They, they, they get us to rethink how we're framing something in our head, because how we currently frame it is already causing us to sabotage our own success or being able to move forward or to make our lives better.

Isn't that what we're talking about here? I mean, if, if the idea, I mean when I hear the word conversion, I mean this might be old school, but if, you know, for those of you who grew up in the eighties, there was this TV series called V and these aliens came down and they had, of course, we all thought they were friendly.

It turns out, you know, thanks to Mike Donovan, we found out they weren't. And one of the things that they were doing is they would pull humans into this conversion chamber. That is literally what it was called. And it was this torture, you know, this mental torture that transformed your mind and made you reliant on them to the point where you started to serve them even though you were a human being.

And they would try to turn people that way. And if you think about it, I mean it's, it might be a little bit extreme. But I mean, it doesn't, that, isn't that what it sounds like we're trying to do in the old way? Since we're on a topic today of like old ways of looking at things and talking about things, we're trying to convert, we're trying to create a conversion of this member of our audience.

So instead, we are setting things up to provide value, and then if they act, if they do what we want 'em to do, then they basically said, yes, I want to take the next step in this. I wanna move forward because you have provided me with what I was looking for. And that is validation. And I would much rather have somebody in my audience.

Validate that my business is doing what I'm hoping it does for them, and then translating to business versus this idea that I've got this strategy to convert them, you know, into something that I am just from the get go. It's all focused on me and what I want them to do. And maybe, maybe validation isn't the word that would work in your business, depending on the business you're in, but maybe there's another word out there other than conversion.

All right. Moving on to page four. Well, we are about to connect with Sabrina Amjad. She is the advisor and founder of Vanbri Consulting, which offers tailored solutions for business and tech. Sabrina is also a speaker, AI and transformation strategist and behavioral change architect, and she's going to give us her insight on where things are with AI in business, especially with the here and now and where things are going.

She not only monitors all this, but she also helps business leaders understand why humans are still needed in all this, and they're going to continue to be needed in this even as AI continues to evolve. So let's now connect with Sabrina who is coming to us from Washington, DC today. Hello, Sabrina. Thank you for taking time to talk with us today.

Sabrina: Hello, Scott. Good afternoon. Thank you for having me here.

Scott: My pleasure, and I'm so glad that, uh, we're, we're getting to talk to you today because so much of what we're talking about is ai. And before I get into a couple of questions I wanted to ask you, based on what you've been seeing lately, could you give everybody a little background about what you do and, and kind of how you've even reached this point where, you know, even AI and kind of the balance between human and AI involvement and the impact it has on business has, um, worked into what you're doing now.

Sabrina: Thank you for that, Scott. So, you know, uh, a little bit about myself is, uh, I came to the US about two decades ago with $1,800, if you will, in my pocket, courtesy of my dad, uh, to find a scholarship or go back home. And I did. I made my way on the ex Allen, ex Deloitte Ex and Yu. In leadership roles where being our principal partner, if you will, uh, we're driven the adoption of large, uh, thinking between behind technology transformation.

Uh, we, I'm also the founder of Van Bury Consulting. We are an SBA fan based outta Washington, DC and we primarily focus on not just the strategic implications of what different. Organizations go through bot, we look at ai, uh, in terms of the investments being made to date. So when AI comes in the crux of any, be it a government entity or private sector, we end looking at it from where does AI intersect to?

Why are you looking at AI to really look at holistically, not from the perspective of just this is a tool that will make our lives better, but what is the human component of that organization? What are we trying to do in terms of driving empathy, driving more of a human, uh, emotional intelligence, and how does that mayor onto put the tool and we look at the investments that are need to be made, and how does that translate to the vision of that organization?

Scott: If you look at just kind of a bird's eye view of the last couple of years as AI got really, really hot and all of us lost our minds and said, oh gosh, let's try it all these different ways and let's see what all these things can do. And everybody got really excited about it. I mean, as human beings, we have a tendency to do that too, right?

But I feel like in the last few months, I've started to see even some of the most passionate people. Business people looking at the impact of some of this, especially as I've seen studies come out saying that, you know, some businesses got so immersed in this that they put all this investment and all these and you know, AI and all these things, and then they stepped back and look at what kind of return they were getting on that.

And it wasn't really what they thought, or at least it, it wasn't generating anything. It was more like, let's see what we can make it do. But the results are, are very mixed in some areas it's just not doing anything. Mm-hmm. And I feel like I've seen. Um, some thought leaders now say, okay, let's, let's start really balancing where the lines are between where we're still involved and what it, where it really makes sense to incorporate AI into our business.

And granted, that may vary depending on the business you're in, but are you seeing that same thing where we've had kind of this period where we've tried all these different things and now we're starting to figure something out and not rule out AI altogether, but we're, we're really starting to try to figure out.

Balance now, not only for the sake of our business, but also the people we're trying to serve.

Sabrina: Absolutely. Scott. Uh, you know, that is sort of the theme of the day. I actually was speaking at a conference in New York earlier last week, and then another conference I was speaking at, uh, later last week. Uh, and I'm slated to go to a few more.

And the topics of interest has been consistently being the same. Uh, you know, in terms of. Really looking at what does AI adoption mean? So first of all, to your point, uh, there are organizations that are making an investment ai 91% of all Fortune 500 companies. And I think even that is, you know, a month old or two months old.

Stat acting, though I'd pick a hundred percent by. 91% of organizations of Fortune 500 have employed some sort of ai. But you know what the interesting part of that is? Only 27% of that. Has had some measurable outcomes associated with it. So what does that mean for the remaining percentage of, you know, folks that are going on that?

Does that mean that in order for AI to be the differentiator in the work that we do, we are incorporating it because we're choosing apply? Are we doing it because it's the next shiny belt? Are we doing it because we are looking at not holistically the strategic visioning of an organization? But in fact, once certain particular area we are trying to improve and we're bringing just that particular AI to fix that, what that does when you do that, when you bring in that AI and you bring it in a fragmented approach, think about it, right?

Your customer is looking at one product, one service offering one thing IE you, right? Behind the curtain. Now, if you have employed AI in a disparate sort of thinking, somebody owns the chatbot, somebody owns the help desk, somebody owns the application development, it's very disparate, it's very disjointed.

And when the customer and the client on this side of the table get that really sort of push to have that disjointed experience be translated into a very exhausted. The very tiresome experience for that. That's not even a CX issue in my mind. That's a loyalty issue. That's a brand of being, wanting to be that for the long run issue.

So in that case, when we look at these organizations, when they're trying to go from the 27% to the top, what, how can we uplift that? What we do is we employ a adoption methodology. We look at when an AI tool comes into the mix, how are you looking at the hearts and minds? How are you pulling at the heartstrings and changing mindsets?

Of the people and they're moving from awareness. I heard it from Scott and maybe it's coming my way to, all the way to, I do it. I use it as word and PowerPoint. I don't have conversation about during dinner with my family, but it's part of my day-to-day life. Right? Yeah. How do you get them to do that?

Scott: I feel like kind of what you're saying there, I mean if we look at, if we know that especially more than ever anything related to a.

Content related business decision, we really need to do more. We, I mean, even before ai, we had to, we were really needing to do more to give ourselves a better step one. And I think so much of that is, is self, is self-reflection, self-awareness, stopping and making sure why are we doing this? What is it going to do for us?

And then like you're saying, how is this gonna impact the people on the other side? And is it possible that maybe in those first days, even as well intentioned as we might have been. Maybe we got a little caught up in all the faster, better, and all these things it's gonna do for us. And then we realized, oh, wait a minute.

We're still talking about things that the other side is gonna see and it's gonna have to be some value to them as well.

Sabrina: Absolutely. And when you think about it, right, there's so many aspects of AI that can bring to the mix from a customer's perspective or from a organizational perspective. This is that secret sauce, right?

The 91% I was talking about outta that, 75% of organizations have implemented AI because they want to become a disruptor in the next three years. They have a time bit in mind in the next two to three years. They are hoping to be the best of the best. The niche payers cost optimized. You know, more and less people doing more, they're hoping to check off all those boxes by just bringing in that AI tool.

Now, is that a a grandiose goal of sorts? Maybe. Maybe. Is it feasible? I don't know. Depends on what the culture of your organization is at. Depends on where you're trying to go with it. So in terms of that, when you are trying to really do that lift. You can't just use AI to proper fledge your customer experience journeying and imprint imprinting it, if you will, on your customer.

You need to layer the human element of it. There is a static, again, I'm throwing quite a few metrics, 50% of all frontline, uh, you know, uh, marketing and or, uh, frontline of work, if you will, can be done, can be automated per se. Should it be automated? Now here's the thing. When you lose the human aspect of dealing with the stress and strategy and you just leave AI to go scale, you have lost the tone of your brand.

You've lost the bias that goes with your brand, your brand, your servicing, certain demographics. There is bias that comes through, right? Um. You have lost the flavor of what you want to say. What are you trying to do with that? My take away from that, my recommendation is always, always to layer the AI underneath the human element.

Let human deal with the stress and strategy, right? But the AI help you scale. AI be help you become that disruptor through being able to do more for you, but not losing that human incentive because then you have lost customer's trust, you have lost customer's. Brand loyalty.

Scott: And MIT and a lot of really good researchers and others are starting to really figure out kind of where those lines are, especially if we have to make a human to human connection.

You know, that's always going to have to start with humans and AI can just fill some of those gaps or give us new questions to consider or any number of other things. And yeah, then you've got all that hard stuff kind of tedious stuff that it can do, that we can spend more time on. Maybe improving that, not that, uh, human connection.

So with all this in mind, based on kind of what we're hearing from you, let, let me just run this last question by you because I, I feel like this has to be on everybody's mind too because I feel like, um, you know, a lot of people that are with us right now, um, are, are definitely wanting to ensure that human element stays and right now.

At the stage we are now, it might be pretty easy if we're paying attention to be able to see where, where that line is and why the human element is still needed. But then we have those that are still worried and they're like, well, the, the thing that we keep hearing about ai, and this is true, that it's gonna get better, right?

It's gonna get more advanced. What it's weak at now, it's gonna get better. Even if it doesn't do this real well right now. It's gonna get better. It's gonna get better three years from now, five years from now, it's not gonna be. What it is, it's gonna be better. And then sometimes we hear that in the context of, you know, people who might push why humans are still needed for this and why there's these creative and empathetic things that AI can't replicate.

But then there is that response of, well, you know, AI is gonna get better. That makes people fear that somehow AI can get so much better that that's going to reduce our role. Do you see that happening? Or can both be right? Can it still get better and can still humans be needed as much five years from now as they are today in the process?

Sabrina: Oh, Scott, what a wonderful question. Believe it. Or. This is again, you know, uh, what my thoughts are in times of how I see this playing out on the wild stage globally, you know, internationally or nationally within our private sector, right? In times and public sector as well. AI will continue to flourish.

We'll continue to be competent, no doubt about that. We're already seeing job starts from where we were a year ago. We are seeing so many of leaps at, at where we are at. The human element to sit on top of it is so crucial. Now more than a think about it. I'll give you a couple of scenarios. Even if you've got the best of best AI tool, there is a, again, going back to metrics.

86% of customers are clients want to know when they're speaking to a agent or au they want to know that it's a human that they're interacting with who ask their back. Let me put it into case in point. So for example, if you are applying for your first mortgage, you're buying a new, right, you are applying for fafsa.

Your student loan applications, right? For yourself, for your children, Medicaid forms, uh, for your elderly parents, for yourself, for your, uh, children. What if that was to, there was a discrepancy. That was a mistake that was being made for bot. However, it is, you know, shop it is you either, something didn't flow through that person on the other end of the line or the other side of the curtain.

Want to know? That it is a human. Then in terms of the other part of this human connection is if you lose that human connection, now there's a trust issue. Do I really trust that to do, uh, really connect me? So an AI tool may common, the ai, uh, perspective of growth may become better and more robust. No doubt about it, but.

What we do well as humans, we do storytelling. We do emotional resonance. When we use emotional resonance, we are using three regions of our brain memory, empathy, and uh, emotional connections, right? So when we use those three regions of our brains, we are apt to really connect with certain customer bases through storytelling.

That's emotional storytelling Now. AI can help you. Personalize those stories, can help you go to scale with those stories, can help you penetrate different demographics with those stories. But can it really hit those regions of a creative mind from a human and do that? Um, it is not the marketeer who is a creative person who is in marketing or creative person who's using ai will probably never go outta business.

But the person who is using and become a prompt engineer that is learning to be a prompt engineer, may not be strategic in nature, is not retooling their brain to be more strategic. IE. A part of their job. To your second part of your question, a part of their job may change, but because they're becoming more strategic in nature, if they don't know and have not used that skillset to really learn that how to rehung their muscle memory and rehung that, then it's going to be extremely on for them to stay with the time.

Scott: Fantastic information as expected. Sabrina, thank you so much for taking time to talk with us today. And I, I bet there are people that would love to carry this conversation on with you. What's the best way to, to find you and connect with you to keep this conversation going if they have more questions on what you've been able to learn about this so far?

Sabrina: Oh, Scott, thank you again. Thank you for this platform. Thank you for being, having hosting me on this show, if you would, um, van dre llc.com. Again, van dre llc.com. That's our website. In addition to that, I'm, uh, on LinkedIn. Look me up there. Uh, Sabrina Andra, A-M-J-A-D or re consulting if you will. Uh, look us up.

Uh, you know, come see, see for us. And we are actually the point, we, the industry as it is right now. We are providing free advisory at our. For folks who are kind of going through this time of really understanding where does AI fit within that organization? What does our strategic vision and mission change as they move forward?

Come and talk to us. Maybe get a little bit of leadership relief that will help you set your way forward. Bye. No, thank you so much, Scott. I really appreciate the chance to be yet.

Scott: Thank you, Sabrina. All right, well let's wrap everything up on page five. So after that fantastic conversation with Sabrina about AI and humanizing content and finding the balance.

I wanted to wrap up today by sharing something with you that you might find really interesting when it comes to maybe utilizing some of that balance between the human side and the AI side, while still kind of focusing and making sure that we're sticking to the human elements of our content. So the example I wanted to share with you comes from Roger Dooley, who is a keynote speaker, author, and marketing futurist.

He wrote something that was really interesting as far as AI helping you, uh, gauge your own emotional intelligence. He says, emotional intelligence is uniquely human, right? Nope. New research at the University of Burn found six leading AI models, including chat. GPT-4 outperformed humans on standardized emotional intelligence tests.

It wasn't even close. AI averaged 81% versus humans, 56%. But here's the important part for every business leader. If AI doesn't just score higher on the test, it can spot empathy failures that seasoned executives completely missed. And he actually gives a really cool example here. He points out that. He went on a cruise with Royal Caribbean and he fed the cruise line's.

Tone deaf communication about rerouting a luxury ship mid voyage for a marketing photo shoot to Claude ai. It immediately flagged multiple empathy failures that the company executives had missed. Im personal tone that ignored passenger stress tone, deaf request for guests to celebrate the disruption and the complete absence of any apology.

AI then predicted the guest reactions with startling accuracy Forum comments proved it right. Shocking, absurd, lost their minds. Clinches my decision to go elsewhere. This isn't about AI replacing human judgment. It's about a cognitive bias, blind spot that affects all leaders under pressure. We get tunnel vision on our business objectives and lose sight of stakeholder emotions.

Groupthink sets in. People don't want to disagree with the boss. The 81% to 56% performance gap reveals something profound. We're often not as emotionally intelligent as we think we are, especially when focused on internal goals or operating within groupthink dynamics. My advice, every major business decision with customer communication should now include AI empathy audits.

Pre-launch communication reviews, crisis response drafting, stakeholder impact analysis, customer journey emotion mapping. Companies using AI to enhance, not replace their emotional intelligence will build stronger relationships. Those ignoring AI emotional capabilities will keep making avoidable empathy failures.

Sounds like pretty good advice, especially for that cruise ship. I mean, do you find yourself wondering what that announcement sounded like? Good afternoon, fellow adventurers. You know, one of the most exciting things about a journey at sea is that anything can happen, and today it has. We'll be making a slight change to our itinerary as we take part in something truly special, a rare and exclusive marketing shoot featuring our stunning ship in all her glory.

While we won't be docking at our originally scheduled port, this detour lets a set sail in a moment view, get to experience where the journey itself becomes part of something bigger and more branded. So kick back, soak up the sea breeze and no, you're on a voyage. So iconic. It's camera worthy. Who knows?

You might be just somewhere in the background of the next great cruise campaign, and thanks for being the kind of guests who turn every twist into part of the adventure. I mean, honestly, in a way, when you look at some of the things he wants you to do. There's a lot of the stamp formula in that you're just using AI to help you develop your process for it.

It's filling in some of those gaps that might already be there. I mean, yes, humans are still gonna be needed in, uh, multiple aspects of it, but it sure is nice to have something, be able to kind of gauge where the gaps are and then you can address them Again. Some of that might be, uh, as far as what you say and how you say it might be rooted in your brand or kind of the tone you want to set.

I mean, if anything, it might at least train more of your content creators or content strategists to be able to, uh, gauge empathy and where some of those gaps are. I mean, really what this is, this is predictive intelligence. This is trying to stop and think about, okay, before we blast this out. Let's stop and think for a minute about how, if we're in their shoes, how are they going to respond to this when it's written or said this way.

And yeah, if you can't. Naturally do that or can't gauge that through any different ways that you can, um, gauge what people might be thinking in these circumstances, whether through your own experience or people that you've talked to, then maybe AI is the answer. I will just say you could probably learn some of that or pick up on some of that sometimes just by stopping and thinking, okay, if I'm on the ship and this happens, you know, is this gonna be fun if they frame it in a fun way, or am I gonna still react negatively?

There's, there's elements of it we could probably gauge just by switching places, or this is one of the reasons why it's so important for, um, departments that have public interactions in some way. Maybe it's customer service, maybe it's sales. You know, find out things from them as far as what they know about people's attitudes and, and go from there.

I mean, there's, there's a lot we can learn from the people in our own organization and with all the tools we have to communicate today and put out surveys and any number of things. There's other stuff we can, we can do too, to learn directly from the people we serve, so we don't accidentally jump the gun, make assumptions, and create content that ends up doing more harm than good.

But yeah, if you need AI to help you get started with that, or at least start helping you identify the gaps, it's there and apparently it can work. And I thought that was great. Well, that's today's human content brief. You will find links to all of the resources and insights found in this briefing on the website, which is your content brief.com.

This will include links to our guest today, Sabrina Amjad, and I'd like to thank her again for her report today. If I can be of assistance to you or your business, whether you're looking for a way to create humanized content or evolve existing content to be more human, I'm here to help you stand out and make a more meaningful connection with your audience.

You can find me on LinkedIn or my website, which is Scott Murray online.com, or there's always an email transmission. I'm atScott@scottmurrayonline.com. Thanks for joining me today.