Trust Over Attention

For as long as businesses have been trying to promote themselves, they’ve competed fiercely to attract people’s attention. And it was often an asymmetrical fight. The companies with the largest budgets could afford to produce and propagate more content than their rivals – and this gave them a huge advantage.

But then, AI entered the picture and flipped that dynamic almost overnight. Today, content is abundant, cheap, and disposable, which means attention is no longer the rarest commodity. Trust is.

Right now, anyone can generate highly polished corporate messaging in short order and without much cost. In a way, it levels the playing field. But it also introduces a new problem. If everyone can produce basically the same kind of content, will anything stand out? Or will it all blend into a morass of indistinguishable, perfectly bland slop?

Many marketing and communications teams under pressure to show ROI are using AI to flood channels with generic, pattern-matched content simply because volume is easy to produce and measure.

But if everyone plays that game, it’s going to be harder than ever to win and differentiate your brand from everyone else out there.

Also, a lot of people are already pushing back on AI-generated content. And AI overall. This year, graduates at colleges across the country booed the people brought in to give their commencement addresses when they began to talk about the impact AI is going to have on their careers and lives.

I’m convinced we’ve moved past the era of attention scarcity and have entered the era of trust scarcity. When everything looks and feels the same, when misinformation runs rampant, when we’re increasingly bombarded by information everywhere we look and don’t know what’s true – people are going to place even more value on doing business with companies they trust, that are human, that they form a personal connection to, and that deliver authentic and unexpected experiences.

Think about any great brand, past or present. Were they built on the next logical thing? Of course not. They were built on some new or novel idea that may have even seemed crazy or unworkable at the time. Or on the personality of the founder of the company. Or what the company stood for that resonated with people who felt like the company got them and contributed something to their lives.

If you hope to do any of that, you need a foundation of trust. Trust your company is what it says it is and will do what it says it’ll do. Trust that there’s a human heart beating someone behind the story you tell.

In a world saturated with synthetic prose, the honest – and sometimes even vulnerable – human voice is your greatest asset.  When you share a real story – a founder’s struggle, an employee’s experience, or a contrarian piece of intellectual capital that challenges the industry consensus – people lean in. They do it because they can sense a real person on the other side who understands them and shares their values.

I’m not saying not to use AI. I’m saying use it strategically. As a virtual partner who can improve your thinking and make you more efficient, but who’s never in the driver’s seat when it comes to defining who you are, telling your story, and building trust based on human-to-human connections.