AI Sean makes his return!
Feeling overwhelmed by AI hype?
In today’s episode, we unpack the reality of AI’s impact on marketing and introduce the idea of Authentic Humanity. Authenticity is key in building trust with customers.
AI can be a tool, but it’s not replacing the human touch anytime soon!
This is part 3 of my 5 part series this week!
SOURCES: https://aimagazine.com/news/mit-why-95-of-enterprise-ai-investments-fail-to-deliver
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
We’re out of the office for a couple of weeks, and so we’ll close out 2025 with some short episodes about the lessons we’ve learned from marketing this year and also the things we need to consider about 2026.
So I don’t know about you, but I’m really, really tired of talking about AI. In talking with my marketing colleagues, I think we’ve all been pretty underwhelmed by the actual execution of all the promises big technology companies have been making about their large language model platforms lately, and I covered all of this in a lot more detail in one of our episodes last week.
But let me introduce a new acronym to you, and that’s AH, or Authentic Humanity. I haven’t heard anyone else using this term, but if they are, hey, I came up with it too, and I’ve been using it to describe what a lot of people call the “human touch.”
So, first of all, let’s acknowledge that AI is an interesting tool, but it’s not a very useful one for most people.
All those folks you see bragging on LinkedIn about vibe coding and automating their workflows and all that are actually the exception to the rule – a paper from MIT called “The Gen AI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025” found that despite billions of dollars in investment, only 5% of AI pilot programs have made any sort of impact on profit and loss, and the rest have been pretty much useless.
Even worse, the report finds the ways a lot of people are using AI at work is through personal utilization rather than well thought out business initiatives. This might seem good on the surface, but the actual truth is that they’re often utilizing AI in ways that are not secure and which are also not confined by the guardrails of approved vendor software – they’re often just putting queries into ChatGPT without realizing that their prompts are very possibly something that another user could expose through the platform.
There’s also the very serious problem of AI delivering incorrect results through what are often called hallucinations. Some models are trying to get around this by using tricks where multiple AI programs are running to create and check each other’s output, but hallucinations are still so common they’re estimated to happen at least 40-50% of the time on most models, and they’re actually getting more common, not less so, as the models evolve.
I didn’t need to see much evidence of this happening before I outright refused to use general-purpose AI software for my own research and analysis; I’ve watched models invent research participants and data out of thin air, and I can’t run the risk of that happening in my work as a researcher because my credibility would be on the line!
So the business case for large language models, at least at this time, is not too strong.
But it’s not to say these tools aren’t useful. They really can be!
Where large language model AI is most useful is in applications like transcription, summarizing text, creating starting points for human beings to take over and for proofreading.
If you want to use ChatGPT for those purposes, it’s a helpful and mostly reliable tool.
I’ve also had limited success with deep research tools that can scan periodicals and academic papers. But I’d still caution you to treat the output like it came from early 2000s Wikipedia and check your sources directly rather than rely on the output of the AI platform.
What I encourage us all to do is to stop talking about AI as if it’s the next stage of human achievement. In truth, large language models are a neat technological magic trick that won’t get much better than what we see today – they’ll just get more portable.
But as for the rest? Agentic AI built on the current tech is an inefficient mess that can’t be relied upon, and other AI applications for image, video or audio generation come with huge caveats, not the least of which includes copyright concerns.
Other forms of AI that are used for pattern recognition, hardware and software optimization or improving image and video quality are definitely far more useful, but less sexy to talk about.
In fact, we might not even call those things AI down the road. To that end, there’s a really famous quote from Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. Here it is:
“A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it’s not labelled AI anymore.”
That quote is not from 2025 by the way. It’s from 2006! Twenty years ago.
So now let’s talk about Authentic Humanity, or AH.
It’s no secret in marketing that authenticity is a key requirement for many consumers right now. Study after study shows that the brands that fare best are the ones that can create true human connections with their customers, live their values, stand up for their employees and engage in corporate social responsibility by cleaning up their own messes, giving back to their communities and taking good care of the environment.
You can see it in customer service. The companies who are consider the best at customer service are generally those where you can directly reach a human being on the phone and not have to spend time in an automated queue. And in services, customers also often want a face to face servicescape where they can go and talk to someone directly if they have a problem.
You can also see it in brand management and marketing. Very few people want to engage with a brand on a daily basis, but when the brand is doing something cool that interests them? They’re open to it, and they appreciate the effort the brand puts into creating something fun and engaging.
You can see it in product marketing and services. Customers are tired of having to choose between many options for products and so they like to search for reviews and testimonials from real people so they can feel like they’re doing their due diligence in selecting a product or service they can trust. They often report that they read both the positive and negative reviews so they can feel like they’ve heard the true story, warts and all. And they have a higher level of respect for brands that own up to their mistakes and admit their faults.
You can even see it in B2B marketing. What works in B2B today is not slick marketing campaigns – it’s relationship-building and face to face discussions either in person or via video platforms. Marketing and sales get the conversations started, but many deals fall through because the two parties don’t reach a point where the customer feels like their needs will be taken care of, particularly if they have a problem.
This is the stuff AI can’t and won’t replace. It can’t be Authentically Human because it’s only really able to fool us with a facsimile of what a human seems like.
If we treat it as the tool it is and use it as a starting point to allow us to get started on connecting to others, AI can be very valuable. But just like Autocomplete sometimes gets things wrong and search terms sometimes don’t lead us where we want to go, AI can get us on the wrong foot in human interactions. And because AI tends to be so confident and sycophantic, putting too much trust in it can lead us down the wrong path if we don’t develop a heavy skepticism for whether or not it’s actually being useful.
And that where we, as humans, need to step in and take over, because unlike the tools we use, we can tell when we need to try a different approach without being told by a user.
As it turns out, there’s just no replacement for Authentic Humanity.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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