Over the past year, I’ve spoken with a number of people across many different industries who are all asking the same question: Where will people fit in the coming AI revolution?
Some feel like the hype around AI is overblown. It’s no different than the Industrial Revolution, they say, which certainly displaced jobs but eventually created more opportunities. Others suggest more dire consequences – AI wiping out all professional jobs first and then humanity.
My opinion on the matter is perhaps as much of a guess as anyone else’s. But if I were to wager one trait that will be valued above all others in this machine age (especially on the marketing side), it would be empathy.
Why? First, let’s define what empathy is and why it’s important in marketing.
In short, empathy is the ability to understand, be sensitive to, and vicariously experience the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another person.
In marketing, empathy means genuinely seeing things from the customer’s perspective and prioritizing their needs, motivations, and emotions. This involves “feeling with” others—connecting to the emotions another person is experiencing.
Empathy’s Importance in Marketing
Empathy builds trust and emotional connections, which are more influential to decision-making than logic alone. Empathetic marketing also makes campaigns more relatable and effective, fostering customer loyalty and brand growth.
Why can’t a machine do this as well? Here are a few reasons.
No. 1: Because of Empathy, People Are Just Better at Human-to-Human Connection
If you think about what a machine does well and much better than any person can, it has the ability to sift through massive amounts of data and synthesize it, either creating something out of it (generative content) or providing an analysis of trends, sentiments, performance, etc. And if you put the right data in and/or create the right queries, you can be reasonably assured that what you get back today will be accurate and, in most cases, pretty interesting and professional.
But right now, even the smartest machines will still come up short when it comes to really connecting with people, which is absolutely critical from a marketing standpoint. After all, they have no empathy for the human experience. They don’t feel pain, joy, anger, sadness, or envy. They don’t have ambitions. They don’t go through depression. They’ve never felt intimacy, tasted alcohol, or tried weed.
As human beings, the clear advantage we have is that we can learn about others, be curious about what drives them, and we can pinpoint that shared feeling in our gut exactly. And in the machine age, the thesis here is that people will crave more of that human-to-human connection. Where this makes a difference is almost certainly on the margins – those little intangibles that matter in terms of knowing what feels right and what doesn’t.
So, as an example, you can input all the data in the world into a machine about human emotions. You can feed it historical data, outcomes, conditions, the challenges of being human, how others connected, etc., and whatever you ask it to do, it will probably do it reasonably well. But it won’t exactly understand that ‘fit’ when it comes to connecting with a human being. Something may always be slightly off. And that’s because “connecting” on that deeper level— and the intricacies around that will certainly be something uniquely human, at least for the foreseeable future.
No. 2: Empathy Allows for More Creativity Than What a Machine Can Do Today
We did a previous post on what happens to creativity in the age of AI. Technically, a machine can be creative. It can understand what shared understanding exists between people and, based on continuous training of the algorithm, can eventually produce something that “seems” creative and would probably qualify as such.
But like the previous point about “connection,” creativity is nuanced. That shared understanding that’s fed into a machine will never quite match the gut feeling that the most empathetic and curious marketers understand about the human condition. Consider this to be the difference between an amusing movie and a really funny movie. Right now, a machine can produce something relatively amusing. But something really, really funny? That still remains in the realm of other people.
No. 3: Empathy Leads to More Iteration Around That ‘Right Thing’
I was reading an article the other day about actor/director Ben Affleck’s comments on AI. He was arguing AI, at least in its current state, would never be able to exactly replace what he does in terms of creation. His reason: AI would never know when to say “Cut.”
“The function of having two actors or three or four actors in a room and the taste to discern and construct… that is something that currently entirely alludes AI’s capability and I think will for a meaningful period of time,” Affleck said.
Think about this from a marketing standpoint. How many times have you looked at a creative or created a tagline from a marketing standpoint that “just didn’t feel right”? That’s a gut reaction fed by your empathy for a particular situation or circumstance. Well, with AI, it doesn’t discern good or bad, really. At least in its current state. It churns out “workable.” There is no higher-level or higher-order production. There is no “elevating” what already exists or tweaking that to make an output even more special or memorable. Empathy drives real iteration, something the machines don’t currently do.
A Lot of Our Leaders Have No Empathy, but It’s Their Loss, Not Yours
I think it’s easy to look at some of our most “successful” leaders (based on net wealth or status) and want to emulate them. They’re rich or famous after all. These are people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Orange Nightmare. And even many of the AI leaders that may seem “more” empathetic on the surface (Sam Altman or Dario Amodei).
But I’d argue many, if not all of them, act very much like a machine. They might fake empathy (some don’t even do it as well as a machine), but they don’t truly care for other people. To get where they are and to make the money they have, they had to be ruthless. To use a term we’ve been using a lot lately, they “extract” value from things; they don’t add value.
They feel nothing for you, the average person.
And I think it can be tempting to follow the same path. But, in truth, pursuing that only leads us to a path where we all become less human. More like a machine that doesn’t feel anything for someone else, but tries to fake it. And if you think about the future, that doesn’t end well for humanity.
In the end, isn’t it better to continue to be curious about other people and get to know them? To try to put yourself in the shoes of someone else? The rewards of that will always be much greater.
