THE HUMAN PROBLEM: YOUR BRAND IS BEING INTERVIEWED WITHOUT YOU.
Someone may be asking about your company right now.
The interesting part is that they may not be asking you.
They might be asking ChatGPT which dermatologist to see. Which hospital has the best orthopedic program. Which product is safest. Which consultant actually knows what they're talking about.
And increasingly, AI may answer before your website ever gets the chance.
So, as promised, I used AI to help me think about this.
I asked it a simple question:
What do you know about my company?
The answer was fascinating—and a little unsettling.
It knew what Confluence does. It understood the kinds of clients we work with and could describe our areas of expertise. Some of that came from information I’ve deliberately put into the world. Some of it was assembled into a version of Confluence I hadn't actually written.
For decades, companies have worked incredibly hard to control how they present themselves. We built websites, developed messaging, managed PR and obsessed over Google.
Now there's another voice in the conversation. And we don't completely control what it says.
Your brand is increasingly being constructed from everything the internet knows—or thinks it knows—about you: your website, reviews, articles, social posts, press, customer experiences and what other people say about you.
Which brings me back to where I started this week.
I thought I was going to spend The Human Problem worrying about AI.
Instead, I kept coming back to humans.
Do we trust the technology? Do we trust what we're seeing? Do we trust the answer? And do we trust ourselves to know the difference?
I’ve used AI all week to research, challenge my thinking, flesh out ideas, and help me write these posts. And I've noticed something slightly unnerving.
AI is getting better at sounding like me.
But sounding like me isn't the same thing as being me.
It can help me think. It can't decide what I believe.
At least, I'm keeping that job.
And strangely, after spending a week thinking about The Human Problem, I'm feeling a little more optimistic.
Which is good.
Because I'd really rather not spend next week under the covers.
Note from Human Lisa: AI wrote this entire post from my prompt, including my previous posts on The Human Problem.
#TheHumanProblem #BrandStrategy #AI #AISearch #Marketing
