Why Human Signals Matter More in the AI Content Era

Happy Wednesday! Today’s issue is jam-packed with great stuff, including:

Let’s get started!

As AI floods every inbox, feed, and search result, the real differentiator may be something technology can’t fake for long: genuine human connection. I recently spoke with Cahill Camden, Founder and CEO of Novacast.ai, an AI-powered podcast booking platform. Novacast AI helps founders, B2B business owners and agencies enhance their business through thought-leadership and engaging podcast conversations.

His view: When AI makes content cheap, human trust becomes premium.

Let’s jump in.

➗ Communications is splitting between people who see AI as a force multiplier and those who see it as a race to the bottom. Which side are you on — and why?

💬 Cahill’s take: It’s both.

If you're well-versed in working with AI, prompt engineering, contextualizing your conversations, understanding the limitations of AI, etc. — then you can (and should) leverage it as a force multiplier. At the same time, if you're using AI with relatively little guidance or fine-tuning, then it will be a race to the bottom. You'll create AI slop: generic writing, inefficient workflows, and little to no human context in your communications.

🔑 Key idea: AI is neither savior nor threat on its own — outcomes depend on whether humans use it strategically or lazily. (And we can easily fall into the trap of the latter!)

🌊 If AI content floods every channel, does human conversation become more valuable? Will audiences punish brands for AI-assisted output — or just bad output?

💬 Cahill’s take: It will work in waves. There is already a push against AI-assisted output and content creation on many platforms. Then we'll get comfortable with aspects of it, and someone will push it beyond our comfort zone. There will be pushback there before it becomes standard again. The cycle will repeat.

At the end of the day, I believe humans crave, trust, and learn from human experience. Meanwhile, AI will continue to provide fantastic analytical insight, education, and knowledge to those who seek it. The nuance is in the context of the topic at hand. Brands using AI to fabricate "human experience" will likely experience lowered trust — while those who use AI for education, knowledge, analysis, etc. will build trust. 

🔑 Key idea: Audiences won’t reject all AI use; they’ll reject AI that feels deceptive, hollow, or fake.

☎ Podcasts, long-form video, live Q&As — any unedited format — are having a moment, partly as a reaction to AI content. Do you see this as a lasting shift in how audiences evaluate credibility, or a temporary correction?

💬 Cahill’s take: This has actually been a trend for more than eight years, even before the release of AI. We’ve seen it with podcasts, live conversations, in-person events, and more. Not only is the trend projected to grow over the next five-plus years (for podcasts specifically), I think it will accelerate.

It's one reason we focus on sparking more human-to-human connections via podcasts. We believe there should be more authentic human conversation. We believe audiences want to know and trust the people on the other end of a product or service who have the knowledge, insight, and ability to deliver on their promise. Even if that promise uses AI at its core.

🔑 Key idea: The rise of unedited formats isn’t a fad — audiences increasingly trust communication they can see happening in real time.

🤔 What's the single most common mistake you see smart communications people make when they integrate AI into their workflow — and what's the fix?

💬 Cahill’s take: Lack of context and relevance. In order to get the most from AI in any workflow or communication channel, you'll need to be very specific in how you prompt, guide, and set up your AI. Not everyone does — to say the least.

For example, we've spent a lot of time adjusting and tweaking our AI prompts in our platform. We've been very intentional in how we use AI. We're constantly upgrading as new learnings emerge. We're seeing that while AI can work wonders in many areas, without the right guidance and focus it, more often than not, misses the mark. My suggestion: keep it focused. Apply AI to a narrow set of tasks that can clearly demonstrate value to your business. Provide it with additional context and insight and you'll get great results.

🔑 Key idea: Most AI failures come from vague inputs; narrow use cases plus strong context create the best results. Garbage in, garbage out.

💡 My thoughts:

I’m less interested in the pro-AI vs. anti-AI debate than the thoughtful-AI vs. lazy-AI divide. The best communicators will use these tools with precision, context, and restraint. Everyone else risks publishing faster on the road to irrelevance.

The winners will be the communicators who build AI-powered systems that remove rework — while preserving the trust, judgment, and lived experience no model can replicate.

Want to share how your team is approaching AI? Reply to this email — let's talk!

Go on tangents. Change your mind mid-sentence. Say "um" twelve times. Wispr Flow doesn't care — it takes everything you say, strips the filler, and gives you clean, structured text ready to paste into any AI tool.

The result: prompts with the full context your AI tools need to give you useful answers. Not the abbreviated version you'd type because typing is slow.

Works inside ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and every app on your screen. Millions of users worldwide, including teams at OpenAI, Vercel, and Clay.

Start flowing free

“Can a 40-year-old woman wear Doc Martens?”

That’s a funny question to have caught my attention — I’m not a 40-year-old woman and I’ve never contemplated buying Doc Martens, ever. But I’m glad I noticed it, because what it led me to is brilliant: a free way to do GEO prompt research.

It’s increasingly important for us, as communicators, to understand how our companies, brands, products, and clients appear in AI search results. GEO — generative engine optimization — has to become part of our toolset. And GEO requires a lot of monitoring. We need to be regularly checking ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and more, to see if and how those LLMs are talking about the things we support.

To do that, we need a robust set of prompts that we can feed into the machines. We can (and should!) automate a lot of that; there are a lot of predictable (and somewhat generic) questions that customers ask that we can anticipate. But beyond that, there’s a hard-to-answer question: When consumers think about our brand, what do they care about?

This post by Lindsay Lapchuk of Notebook Agency sparked a lightbulb moment. There’s a goldmine of audience sentiment sitting in Google, and it’s really easy to get to: just type in your brand name and scroll to the “People Also Ask” section. Here’s the section for a search on — you guessed it — Doc Martens, as shared by Lindsay:

Those questions aren’t hand-curated by Google employees — they’re generated based on the oodles (that’s a scientific term) of data that Google Search has at its fingertips. They capture the pulse of your customer. As Lindsay points out, People Also Ask is “basically a real-time perception audit hiding in plain sight.”

And it can supercharge your GEO efforts. Check the “People Also Ask” section regularly. Add those questions into your GEO prompt libraries and monitor the results. Build content that gets you the answer you want. Track changes over time. Repeat. Because if a 40-year-old women want to know if it’s cool to wear Doc Martens, you want the answer to be “yes.”

What happened: Axios reported that as AI-generated content spreads, audiences — especially younger people — are placing more value on authentic human interaction. Morning Consult data cited at the event found 73% say technology weakens human connection, and 65% trust humans more than machines.

Why it matters: For communicators, this is a warning against over-automating brand voice and crisis response. AI can scale content, but trust still comes from visible human judgment. That matters most in brand voice, leadership comms, and crisis response.

What happened: Google’s AI Overviews continue expanding, changing how brands get discovered. One recent update cited a 58% year-over-year increase, with nearly half of search results showing AI Overviews in February 2026.

Why it matters: Communications teams now need to think beyond traditional rankings and into citation eligibility, narrative clarity, and source credibility inside AI-generated answers. That affects earned media strategy, owned content structure, executive bylines, and how brand facts are presented across the web.

What happened: McKinsey argues that purpose-built AI tools grounded in proprietary data outperform generic tools — building custom solutions will unlock massive value.

Why it matters: For comms teams, the practical takeaway is that the most useful AI may be a custom assistant trained on brand voice, message house, policy docs, FAQs, etc. We’re going to be builders, not customers, of AI-powered systems.

Six self-paced courses built specifically for comms pros. No tech background required. Start anywhere — or start from the beginning. Each course takes about 90 minutes.

📡 AI Made Simple — Your first 10 days with AI. No hype, no jargon. Learn what AI actually is, how to write prompts that work, and how to build a personal workflow that sticks.

⚡ AI in Practice — Apply what you've learned to the formats you use every day — press releases, internal announcements, social posts, exec ghostwriting, crisis drafts, and more.

📬 AI with Confidence — Using AI well means knowing when not to use it. Quality control, hallucination defense, brand voice protection, legal guardrails, and how to bring skeptical colleagues on board.

💭 AI as a Thinking Partner — Move beyond drafting and into strategy. You’ll learn to use AI as a strategic partner, not just a writing tool.

🔁 AI Across the Organization — Learn to communicate through change, coordinate across functions, and respond effectively in moments of pressure.

🥇 AI-First Communications — Lead your team into the AI era. Build governance frameworks, design team workflows, evaluate tools, measure impact, and make the case for AI as a strategic capability.

Want free access to the intermediate courses? Refer a colleague to The Comms Stack!

Here are things I’ve built while figuring out how communicators can use AI well — shared here so you can experiment with them too. I’ll keep adding to this list over time.

Not a webinar. Not a panel.

Five days of live sessions with the people actually running thousands of marketing campaigns a month — and handing you the playbook to do it yourself.

Join the Agentic Marketing Summit to be part of the biggest change in marketing to date!

Join Free Today

Looking for a role at the intersection of communications and AI? Here are some opportunities to check out:

Was this forwarded to you by a friend or colleague? Want to get this in your inbox next week? Click here to subscribe!

Quick question: how can I help?

What workflows are you struggling with? Where does AI still feel mysterious or overwhelming? What has worked that you’d like to share with others?

I’m a builder, and I’d love to help you and the rest of The Comms Stack community find great new ways to use AI.

Reply and tell me.
I read every response.

Even a one-sentence reply helps. For example:
“I wish AI could help me with ______.”

Until next Wednesday,

Dan

Advertise | Subscribe