Back in 2008, I started a series called Human Talk because I kept noticing the same thing everywhere I looked: companies communicating with their customers like they were checking off a task on a to-do list, not talking to a person.
I had a name for it: "company pipes". The message would go in one end, get filtered through legal, compliance, brand standards, and some regional manager's anxiety, and come out the other end stripped of anything that felt like it came from a human being. Often it went further than that. The customer wasn't just depersonalized, they were treated as an inconvenience.
What I wanted to do with Human Talk was hold up the exceptions, those brands that had the nerve to sound like themselves. But I also used it to point out the cautionary tales. For every brand I praised, I’d showcase a "bad example," the cold, robotic, or downright hostile communication styles, as a warning to others of what happens when you lose your way.
Strengthening the Connection
I looked at Virgin Airlines, Innocent Drinks , and Whole Foods. I highlighted 404 pages that made you laugh instead of rage quit and parking signs that seemed to understand you were already having a bad enough day. The argument wasn't that warmth was a nice-to-have. It was that removing the unnecessary legal jargon and the impersonal boilerplate actually made brands stronger. Treating a customer like a person was a competitive advantage, not a liability.
I'm bringing the series back because we've swapped one problem for a different version of the same problem.
The Modern Challenge: Efficiency vs. Soul
The old enemy was bureaucracy. The new one is optimization. In the rush to use generative AI to improve every touchpoint, sharpen every headline, and A/B test every pixel into its most efficient possible form, something is getting lost. The industry has a name for it now: the Sea of Sameness.
When every brand uses the same tools to chase the same "optimized" outputs, they stop sounding like themselves. They start sounding like each other. Or worse, like no one at all. Sir John Hegarty has said the industry is losing its creative soul to efficiency. I think that's right, but I'd put it more plainly: we're getting so good at talking at people that we've forgotten how to talk to them.
What's Next?
That's what Human Talk is going to be about. The brands that are getting this right, the ones that have lost the thread, and the harder question underneath all of it: as AI becomes the default tool for communication at scale, how do you make sure the humans on the other side of the screen can still feel a human on this side?
I want to hear what you're seeing. Who's talking to you like a person right now? And where have you stopped feeling it entirely?
