I'm Ant Hodges. This is Less is the Strategy, the podcast that proves doing less is the most powerful business decision you will ever make. Are you ready to find out what becomes possible when you simplify. Then let's dive in. Are you pro AI or are you pro human? It's a divide that many people have to sit on, and they feel like they have to choose one or the other. But let me tell you, the best choice that you can make is the middle path, be pro human in aspects of your business and pro AI in other aspects of your business. Many people will have seen a lot of my social content, or even read my book, Simplify the Funnel, which you can get a copy at Simplify the funnel.com In the book, I make the case for simplified marketing funnels to kind of remove the sense of hustle, remove the complexity that has been brought about by every single funnel building expert and guru on the planet, and in the book I talk about bringing the human back in to the funnel now. Bringing the human back into the funnel isn't about saying no to AI and being anti AI. There's a real good case for AI in every single business. I believe. I don't believe it's going anywhere. I believe it's something we all have to embrace, that we have to work out where it fits and how it fits into our businesses, but there is also a really strong case for human in the business, the human in your marketing systems, the human in your funnels, the human in the relational aspect of building trust with your audience and with your customers. There's a lot of stats, there's a lot of research that has been coming out of late, and this is the kind of stuff I geek out on to really just see what's happening from a trend perspective. Did you know that 51.7% of new articles that are published on the web today are written by AI? They are AI generated, that's up from 2.2% in 2020 but the challenge that we've got with AI-created content, and what consumers are saying today is that they actually don't really like it. Some of the search engines, like Google, that Google are saying that 14% of articles ranking in the search are AI-generated, and that means that they're not ranking all of them, they're not ranking the plethora of, and the tsunami of articles that have been written by AI, and millions of accounts, particularly if you just look at someone like Instagram, millions of accounts in what has been dubbed the great purge has been deleted from the platforms, they've just simply been removed. AI-generated content, faceless content, those accounts are deemed spammy and not of value, and therefore they've been removed. But it doesn't stop there. Some of the other stats that we really need to pay attention to include one that just surprised me more than anything. 50% of consumers prefer brands that do not use AI-generated content. That's half of the consumers out there, when it comes to customer-facing content, prefer human content, yet everybody seems to be going on the bandwagon of creating UCG adverts and reels and avatars that are the customer-facing aspect of the business. So, if that's the case, and consumers are telling us they're voting with their feet, it actually is an even more staggering statistic to see that 73% of consumers, when presented with content, can actually tell whether it's AI generated or not, and half of them, 52% of those people, then choose to disengage with the brand when they've worked it out. This is not great, and this points to the difference that we need to take in our strategy around AI and around what we're using it for in our businesses. There's this shift in people's, particularly entrepreneurs that I meet and I talk with. Of this shift in their mind that talks about the fact that they feel busy, they feel productive, they feel like AI is helping them to generate an awful lot of things, and granted, AI can help you generate a lot of things, you can ask it a few questions, you can ask it to create something, and it kind of just spits out pages and pages and pages, and you think you're being productive. This is the movement in your business that you know you're using the tools, you're programming AI to sound like you. Agents are kind of working in the background, dashboards are lighting up all over the place, because the AI is pulling in all of the numbers for you, and you've got notifications firing off all day, every day. This is good movement in a business, you think, but movement doesn't equal momentum. Has AI helped you to win more customers this week? Has AI helped you to deepen relationships with your customers this week, has revenue and emails subscriptions gone up? Have you earned a lot more revenue? Have you got more subscribers? The reality is that movement has been confused with momentum, and what we need to focus on is the momentum part of our business, most of the most entrepreneurs, the momentum part of our business, the forward motion has actually stalled because we are getting distracted by AI since the dawn of ChatGPT and many of the other AI tools, entrepreneurs are reporting the fact that they are spending far more time creating marketing content, creating reports and presentations, and creating the output to then go and present. They're spending longer doing this than they did before. Many people are saying that they're spending hours and hours, if not days and weeks, spinning up tools and dashboards, only to then find that they're still not giving them what they want when they're using vibe coding tools or they're using tools like Claude Code to be able to code for them they could have actually got something out of the box or found a human being with the expertise to be able to code it up for them far quicker far easier this is the conundrum we're in. We're stuck in a movement economy, and we feel like the movement in our business, that all that surface level activity is feeling productive, but there's very little forward motion and momentum, and we need to change this. We need to understand those statistics around consumers and their preferences around AI content today, and we need to look at our own business. So, my belief is that we need a new way of looking at things. We need to be pro AI from a position of the back office. I think we can use AI for brainstorming and finding patterns, analyzing transcripts at scale from our meetings, reading community survey data and other questionnaires that we might put out there into the marketplace, and organizing our thinking before we even start to think about creating content for ourselves. That's the back office job of AI, but for me the pro human angle is the front line. I believe that sales conversations, handling difficult feedback, community hosting, and the moments that build or break trust, they're the important things that we need to bring the human back into the fold for. So, yes, I'm pro AI in the back office, but I'm pro human on the front line, and that's what consumers are asking for. So we need to work out how we can use the human system to be able to truly build a brand that engages our customers in the best possible way. Now I've been in this game a very long time I've been in the marketing and the online world for well over 20 years. I started in my teenage years, and this year I'll be celebrating my 45th birthday, and it's almost like an anniversary of such for myself, because I remember 30 years ago sitting down in front of a PC, and it had a copy of Photoshop on it, and I started my journey at the age of 1515, and a half, actually starting to look at design, starting to look at marketing, that was really the start of my journey, so yes, I've been in business for over 20 years, but I've been doing this for over 30, and I think, for me, the thing that I've seen throughout all of that is that the customer service aspect, the relationship building aspect of marketing and sales is the one thing that will enable your business to survive and thrive and. When we're living in an AI economy, it's really important that we focus on this part of the business. We focus on the building of customers and relationships and all of that, because if AI does the job of giving information, who's giving, who's doing the job of the human judgment, who's bringing context, who's bringing story, who's bringing the mentoring and the relational aspect, the encouragement and the advocacy for people, the accountability, but also who's bringing the admonishment and the correction. You know, I think we can all go into ChatGPT and we can ask it questions, and it can be, and give us all platitudes and good things. We can even ask it to be critical at times, but it doesn't know how to do both at the same time. The human emotion side of things, and building relationships, it sucks at, and people are paying more and more. Consumers are paying more and more for human interaction today than they've ever paid in their life. That's what we need to focus on in our business, making sure that we're available as human beings to be able to engage and build relationship in the moments that build trust, but also in those moments where trust may have been broken, where people find that they've not experienced what they've purchased, or they want to make a complaint rather than shoehorning them into a bot to try and, you know, have like a post cancelation survey or whatever. Why aren't you speaking with those customers to find out what their challenges were, to see if there's a resolution that you can find, and maybe to solve that from actually happening to anybody else, those kind of things happen from a human to human perspective more and more, and I'm now sitting in a phase where I've written my first book, Simplify the Funnel. I'm consulting across the world as a fractional CMO and interim marketing director for clients. I have a growing community of entrepreneurs, and I'm seeing this balance between human and AI being played out across all sectors and all business sizes. The challenge that the startup and the solopreneur has is that they need to spend time learning how to do all of this AI stuff, which is taking them out of their business, which means it's not revenue generating, because them in their business is what makes them money, and on the flip side, the enterprise level, or the larger businesses, they're looking for ways to cut costs and to simplify and to remove complexity, and they're thinking that AI has the ability to be able to do that, and to be honest, it has, if we think about AI from a back office and a process point of view, because actually, if you can remove back office and process-based tasks from your team members, and when I say team members, I really want you to focus on your organization as a team, not a family, you're a team together on a mission to win something, manage it well as a team, train and bring people on in a big, big way. That is where AI can't handle those relational aspects of you building team, but it's also those people who you've built into your team, you may have had those on your team for years. They are probably the biggest advocates for your brand. You want them customer facing as much as possible. You want them interfacing with your customers inside of a community, on calls, at live events, jumping on community calls, live Q and A's, whatever it might be, allow them to have more space to have more human to human interaction with your audience, and let the back office play out using AI. This is the big shift. Human interaction with our customers, with our audience, is going to make us win hands down over all of our competitors, over everything that we do, and we need to focus on bringing the human back. This is one of the reasons why I created a video training called Built to Be Human. It's a 30 minute master class that you can get access to at Built to Be human.com Built to be human is really just unpacking my human framework, the human method, where we have to hear, understand, meet, advise, and nurture the people who engage within our brands, but more than that, underneath each of those aspects, there's a sub framework that helps us to really understand that more, I'm giving you an introduction to this entire Built to Be Human framework over at Built to Be human.com I'd love for you to go over, get access to the workshop, and start looking at how you can blend AI into your business in the best possible way, and all. So be pro human at the same time, the businesses that are winning today and will win moving forward are those that spend time with their customers, with their audience on a human to human level. There are examples of how I've made this shift myself, you know, on my website, Ant hodges.com there's a little green button that now opens a WhatsApp message. This used to be an AI bot. It was programmed to answer questions around my book and my methodologies. This was the AI interface between myself and my customers, and whilst it would get chats, it wasn't direct human contact with myself, so I switched it up. If you click the button on my website, the little green button on Ant hodges.com it opens a WhatsApp message, says, "What would you like to talk about? And I get a notification on this thing here. I can then send messages back, and the second thing that I've done in relation to this and social media, when people DM me or my, or they message me, I don't have reams of automation set up in the background telling people, "Go here, click here, and depending on what they've clicked on, what they've said, I send them something else, and it's all automated through platforms like ManyChat. It's not when the message comes through, I pick up my phone and I record a video message most of the time, or a voice message, and I send it straight to them, because if they can then see me talking directly to them, that's human interaction. I've brought the human into that process. Yes, I may not have responded instantly. I may not have been on the phone, but I've responded to their message in a way with a human video message. That is where we need to shift things. And third thing that I changed in my business, if you go onto any smartphone, there's a little green icon that's got a like a telephone shape on it. If you click that, did you know you can actually type numbers and speak to someone? You can use it to make phone calls. Now, it's probably the most underutilized app on your phone today, but picking up the phone and speaking to your customers is going to be one of the best ways to be able to build trust and loyalty. One of the things that I do around my events, I run two day marketing sales training events, I run multiple mastermind events. When people book in, yes, they get a welcome email, but they also get a phone call. Every single ticket that books into one of my events gets a phone call from me, so that I can understand why they booked in. I ask the questions, so why me? Why now? Why this event? So I just get an understanding and a flavor. It helps me to understand their challenges, their frustrations, their aspirations, in order for me to be able to deliver amazing content for them. The thing is, we can bring the human back into our business in just simple ways, where we've abdicated that to AI, or we've been told by some hot shot guru or bro marketer that we can automate the crap out of it with AI agents, and then go and live our life on the beach. Listen, if you bring the human connection back into your business, you're going to win over everybody else who is abdicating that relationship building to AI, head over to Built to Be human.com Please grab access to the 30 minute master class training, which unpacks the human framework and the Built to Be Human methodology. I want you to engage, I want you to think about how you can choose to be pro AI and pro human in your business, rather than just one or the other. I am pro AI. I'm also pro human. Let's act as if we are built to be human.