rehumanize

The news media has been abuzz with hand-wringing reports about how ChatGPT will undermine academic integrity.  However, the Artificial Intelligence genie is out of the bottle. AI is happening. It will scale. Its applications will extend to many aspects of daily life, including education. (Microsoft is banking on this, having just invested $10B in OpenAI, the red-hot AI lab behind ChatGPT.)  Every minute we spend romanticizing how things used to be is time we’re not designing ways to harness change.  We heard similar laments years ago when students started using Google Search instead of the encyclopedia; when parents began tethering their kids with mobile phones; when social media became an addictive currency. Over time, we learned to harness something positive from each – access to knowledge; safety; a generation of creators – while remaining vigilant about their dark sides.  Even before ChatGPT, the quality of writing seems to have been deteriorating for decades, at least within the c

Every new marketing model seems to move farther from a fundamental truth – there’s a human on the other side of the screen. We can sense this growing chasm in marketing's increasingly de-humanized vocabulary – addressable markets, cohorts, targets, segments; we can sense it in blunt, one-size-fits-all multicultural definitions and generational tags. Despite being awash in data and analytics that tell us what customers did, most companies don’t fully understand why their customers behave the way they do.    A Harvard Business Review Analytical Services study found that just 23% of executives believe their organization understands their customers’ motivations. (Even if this has doubled since 2019 that's still not great.) Customer Experience, or CX, comes closest to embracing a human-centered truth. Yet here we are in 2023 and CX remains siloed in many organizations.  Being human-centered is not about going analog. Far from it! Data and marketing technologies have given us super