The Human In the Room.

I once had a conversation with the strategy boss of one of Ghana's leading telcos about his shock on realising - he was an expat - when he got here that his research team would sit at their desks and use Google for their mining of customer insights.

Like him, I was trained to believe that the only way to mine customer insights was to observe the customer. I didn't come to that belief by prayer. I was challenged into it by bosses who forced me into it. As consequence, I'd have projects where before I'd write a single pen stroke, I was doing everything from helping a market trader get her stall ready at 5am in the middle of Accra's biggest market, to chatting with women of the night about why they did what they did, to trying not to look horrified when spending time with the college kids who taught me about "waking and baking" to chatting with Uber drivers in Ghana as to why they sometimes declined card payment trips to learning about the micro loan economy that powers the fishmonger scene, to understanding who newly nursing mothers trusted the most when it came to advice on infant nutrition - health care professionals or their mothers. Guess who?

Each time, I came off more enlightened than I was before the conversation, because I genuinely was and it reflected in the work. I was more informed, more empathetic and usually more humbled. As consequence, I've never been a fan of customer focus groups nor people who claim to know their customers because they read "the latest report on..." Enter AI and its ability to now generate everything from customer personas and profiles to social experiment outcomes and suddenly it's not as lazy sounding as using Google. And it truly isn't. AI gives strategists a really powerful tool to hone and sharpen their insights if they know what they're doing. But it doesn't replicate the nuances, micro expressions, and unintentional situations that human observation provides. And it cannot replicate a human experience that makes one come away from each interaction with a better sense of empathy for the human spirit.

I say that to say this: the mastery differentiation will come from those who are not just able to wield AI as the strategic weapon it can be, but also able to combine that with an ability to pay attention to the human in the equation with a sense of dedication that makes P&G envious.

I often refer to that one copywriter who decided fluoride was the thing to sell about toothpaste because even though all toothpaste companies added it, none mentioned it. And how that one insight of what whiter teeth means to humans permeated the fabric of time to this day; Despite the discovery that it appears fluoride is not good for us. A la coke. Pun intended. In hindsight, it could be why no one else mentioned it.

The notion that people will do everything except what they said they'd do for why they claimed they'd do it didn't arise out of thin air.  It came from accumulated contact with reality.

And this is my point. Inevitably, the stranger consequences of AI aided social research as organizations rely more heavily on synthetic research, generated personas and simulated customer journeys, might just be that firsthand observation becomes infinitely more strategically valuable precisely because fewer people will do it.

And so dear reader, I leave you with this thought. When everybody can simulate the customer, the advantage may belong to whoever still bothers to watch one. Godspeed.

Until next time.