[#010] Why Your Competitive Advantage is Being Human

Let me riff here a little bit.

Almost vent a little frustration, for want of a better phrase.

I'm seeing far too many entrepreneurs, creators, and people who want to grow online businesses getting distracted by one thing above all else.

And I want them to find freedom from it, in order to help them to actually grow their business.

It’s actually worrying that something that something that is pedalled as a tool that can help us grow our business, is actually doing the opposite for many people.

I want you to sit and think about what life was like before the 30^th of November 2022.

Now I know what you’re thinking, I can’t even remember how things changed by just looking at that date.

So, why that date? That was the first release of ChatGPT.

What did you do to market your business?

How did you communicate with your audience?

How did you make sales?

The Great AI Distraction

We can now list hundreds, if not thousands, of AI tools that people use to create content - written, audio and video.

They can create virtual staff members. People they would normally have employed are now replaced with AI agents.

To get that set up, you've got to learn the system. You've got to engineer a process for how you bring people into your business and have them interact with the AI agent.

Look, I genuinely believe there is power in using technology to help us improve our businesses.

But here's my biggest thing.

The number of people I speak to whose first answer is "Well, let's ask ChatGPT" or "I've got an AI for that" or "I've built something for that" or "I need to jump into a platform to code that up and use an AI to get that tool ready"...

It's staggering.

When we look at who's really using AI, here's what the data shows

77% of companies are either using or exploring AI in their businesses

83% claiming it's a top priority

(Source: National University AI Statistics)

Who's Actually Shouting About AI?

The large majority of people shouting about AI and the platforms in the marketplace today are the AI consultants. The AI trainers. And all they want to do is sell you a programme or get you into their business or sell you a package of prompts that will just suck you in even more.

Nearly 50% of all funding raised by U.S. startups in 2024 - that's $97 billion out of $209 billion - went to AI-related companies

(Source: Semrush AI Statistics)

The people shouting loudest have a financial stake in keeping you hooked.

What Did You Do Pre-ChatGPT?

Back to the question I asked at the beginning.

What did you do before ChatGPT when it came to marketing, sales, communication, and interaction with your audience?

I believe entrepreneurs, online business owners, and creators have been blinkered. Sucked in and are caught up in a trap of AI.

Yes, it's a tool we can use. Whether for helping us create content, proofreading, grammar checking, brainstorming, or building processes.

But here's the thing.

Once you've done one task and got that dopamine hit - "Oh, that was easy" - what do you do next time?

"It was so easy to use last time, so I want to use it again."

That's the cycle.

And there's actual science behind this that I geeked out over when I read this.

Research shows that frequent engagement with technology alters dopamine pathways in our brains, creating a dependency like drug addiction.

Each notification, like, or share triggers a dopamine release, creating a feedback loop that keeps us coming back for more. (Source: PMC Research on Social Media and Neurophysiology).

This leads to what scientists call dopamine desensitization.

As we get used to high stimulation levels, we need more intense or frequent experiences to feel the same satisfaction. It's a vicious cycle (Source: CBT Digital Media Research).

The Real Problem is How Your Are Using Your Time

I believe this blinkering, this tunnel vision, means entrepreneurs are sat using AI far more in their business than they are creating awesome content from their own heart and their own mind.

They're stuck creating new workflows, testing systems and referring to prompt libraries they have been sold, created by someone who asked AI to create them in the first place. This all stops them from actually building human-to-human relationships.

It’s reasonable to guess that many entrepreneurs are spending 1-3 hours a day in front of a screen interacting with AI and they're allowing further AI tools to communicate with their customers rather than actually building real connections themselves.

AI is just distancing us from the connection with our customers and making them engage with them in stead of us.

People are telling the world of business when they suspect content is AI-generated, 52% become less engaged. 26% would feel a brand is impersonal if the copy doesn't feel human-written, and 20% would feel the brand is lazy (Source: Bynder Consumer Study).

These stats should be a warning to us. But because of the dopamine hit that comes, businesses are still hell-bent on wanting to bring AI into everything!

Your Competitive Advantage is Being Human

I believe there is going to be a time - if it's not here right now - when your competitive advantage is going to be being human.

I honestly believe one of the things we need to look at is minimizing our dependence on AI. Stop using our time in AI as much as we are. We need to come back to how we build real relationships and some of the work we did pre-November 2022.

This will help us to deliver what our customers need for the transformation they are looking for.

This will help us to really echo our core values and allow people to understand what we stand form.

We will better engage with our audience and actually understand their challenges, problems and aspirations.

All of this will give us a way to share our own knowledge and wisdom, to shape our own expert positioning.

This is SEED Marketing Model

Those four things - delivering amazing content, echoing our values, engaging our audience, and shaping our expert positioning - that's the SEED marketing model.

Yes, I gave them to you backwards, but that's the SEED marketing model I wrote about in my book Simplify the Funnel^®

We can allow systems and technologies and new strategies - actually, old strategies dressed up as new strategies - to confuse us and complicate things. In reality, getting back to basics and simplifying our marketing, lead generation and sales processes, is generating more results for those that are choosing to, myself included.

The original marketing framework of getting attention, developing interest, stoking desire, and getting action - the AIDA model - was created in 1898 by Elias St. Elmo Lewis, an advertising consultant. He formulated the principles of "attract attention, maintain interest, create desire" in 1898, later adding "get action."

The AIDA model was developed to explain how personal selling works, laying out a sequence that guides potential customers from awareness to a sale. It’s textbook marketing that still works today, but is over complicated by technology and automation.

We're in 2025. That’s literally 127 years after we were given the ultimate funnel marketing strategy from 1898. Trends change, but frameworks like this work today better than most of the new automation, bot driven tactics.

Time to Show Up and Be Human

All we need to do is show up.

Get attention. How? We stand out. We do something different. We're unique.

That's really the competitive advantage of being human.

Actually creating content ourselves. Getting on video rather than using an AI avatar.

Actually speaking into a microphone rather than using an AI tool to take our text and put it into our own voice.

Actually sitting down and writing from our brains. Even if we dictate, letting that content spill out from our own worldview.

I think the competitive advantage in the future is going to be human.

The competitive advantage for any business is going to be how you connect.

The competitive advantage is how you demonstrate your values and the reasons why you're doing things.

AI Cannot Understand Your Why

AI cannot understand the reasons why you do things or the values you hold in your business - unless you feed it. And then when you do feed it, it could distort those worldviews.

Human-to-human contact brings more genuine connection and goes far beyond that too. It helps your customer get the real result they're looking for rather than an assumed result it things they want. To deliver on the promise you have, you can almost guarantee success by actually helping somebody, mentoring or coaching them through it.

SEED marketing: Shape expert content. Engage your audience. Echo your core values. Deliver amazing content.

That's it.

Created and delivered in a HUMAN way will give you a better result in all of your marketing, communications and delivery of your products and services.

That's how we win in a world where everyone else is chasing AI.

We show up as ourselves. We take the blinkers off. We spend more time with real people than we do programming the latest AI tool.

The divide is clear if you look at it…

Businesses are wanting to adopt AI more and at the same time consumers are telling us they want the human touch.

While everyone else is busy learning the next AI tool, you can be busy building real relationships with real people who want to buy from a real human.

That's your competitive advantage.

As James Caan said... “Observe the masses and do the opposite.”

Let me know your thoughts on all of this. Are you stuck behind a prompt screen more then you are connecting with your customers and your audience? Do you think this matters?