By: Gabby Toro-Rosa, Account Manager at Porter Novelli
AI is here. Three years after ChatGPT launched, it’s everywhere – woven into daily life through Ray-Bans recording meetings, Amazon’s Bee summarizing days and updating calendars. It’s no longer a tool. It’s a daily essential.
But here’s what’s critical: AI can’t provide proof of life. It can’t make customers feel loved, cared for, or genuinely understood. That’s exactly where brands matter most.
The problem AI is making worse.
Cory Doctorow’s book Inshitification sums up what everyone knows: the quality of user experience across the internet is degrading as platforms chase profits, and algorithms serve dopamine-laced bait. AI is amplifying this decay. AI-controlled SIM farms, hardware devices that can hold numerous SIM cards from different mobile operators, create thousands of synthetic influencers that manipulate social media. Users are exhausted and are found leaving big platforms for niche communities in platforms such as Discord and Reddit.
But here’s what data reveals: Large Language Models, or LLMs, trust peer content more than marketing copy. They learn from real conversations in forums and reviews. If a brand isn’t in those authentic spaces, it won’t show up in the answers. Authenticity can’t be messaged. It has to be lived.
The shifts happening now.
From reactive to proactive. Brands that wait for disruption are already behind. The implication: identify weak signals early, or lose the narrative entirely.
From fragmented services to integrated solutions. Siloed teams create blind spots and slow decision-making. Integrated solutions mean one data foundation, one voice, one customer experience. Brands that unify move faster and win more.
From collaboration to integration. Having great assets isn’t enough. True integration means every insight, every channel amplifies the same story. Fragmentation creates noise. Integration creates clarity.
Where brands actually win.
Commerce is collapsing into chatbots. TikTok Shop is forecast to be the 7th largest retailer by 2030. ChatGPT could hit $98 billion in GMV by 2030. These aren’t future scenarios, they’re market realities.
Brands that win have two things: unique, valuable data they own (data AI can’t access from the open web), and authentic proof of life – real service delivery, genuine customer experiences, messy human moments that prove they’re real. These stand out in an ocean of AI slop.
Because in a world where AI can fake almost anything, the brands that survive will be unmistakably human.
