In AIC #194, Do Constraints Create Better Quality?, I talked about the lack of context and clarity that can come out of using AI to do marketing stuff. After thinking about things for a bit, I came up with a potential reason why these super advanced, crazy capable models still get mixed up between what you know, what your audience knows, and what it knows…

AI lacks a sense of self - there's no "me" in Claude or ChatGPT or Grok. Without a sense of self, there is not a sense of otherness. To confirm this suspicion, I actually asked Claude these things:

So many people have compared AI to a child, and it needs to be taught guidelines and all that sort of stuff. But I think it's different because AI, as of October 9, 2026, doesn't really have an identity of its own. It is only reacting in the moment to whatever is in front of it and then connecting it to its training data, which is a little bit old and stale. There is no sense of continuity or experience - as I understand it, AI doesn’t have any skills until it is asked to use them. Then it reviews its training data, underlying code and does whatever it is you’ve asked it to do. It’s not learning & storing experiences in connection to itself, it's only storing instructions and rules in connection to you. It has no perspective.

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I'm sure you are wondering, "Why the fuck am I blabbing on about this?" Well, I've been wondering why marketing hasn’t taken enormous leaps and bounds and fundamentally changed all of the surfaces of persuasion, and made the process of buying and selling, creating desire, solving problems, and the creation of identities unrecognizable by now. With all of the accumulated knowledge of our species, one would think that AI could find enough emotional and logical information to convince anybody of anything.

But it hasn’t. We are still buying and selling things pretty much the same way we have for the past 100 years.

Sure, we buy things via screens when we used to do it in stores, and we use abstract financial instruments rather than barter, but fundamentally, it's the same. I want or need something, and I have to exchange something with you in order to get it. But with zero limitations on access to the most persuasive language ever written and zero limitations on the ability to read academic studies about human behavior and zero limitations on the amount of data that it can analyze, why isn't the process of buying and selling different?

Outside of adequate calories, potable water & habitable shelter, almost all other aspects of buying or selling are tied to identity, desire, or friction. People buy a Rolex because it feeds their sense of identity. We invent things like dating apps to satisfy our physical desires. Most businesses sell something that removes some kind of financial, temporal, or logistical friction and those things are generally connected to creating more financial resources, which are inextricably connected to identity & desire.

Is that an oversimplification? Of course it is - but almost everything that we as marketers do involves identity, desire, or friction.

But since AI has no sense of identity or desire, or friction, it doesn't understand the essential processes of marketing, selling & buying.

okay, I'll get right to it. We are trying to use AI and technology to approximate what amounts to a fundamentally human, emotional interaction between two people - a buyer & a seller.

As marketers, our job is to create enough emotional gravitas and empathy so that a potential buyer enters the commercial space. In to do that, we need to fundamentally understand why somebody might want to engage in our specific commercial space. Is it identity, or desire, or friction that motivates the decision to enter?

But because you have a lifetime of context and a lifetime of experience, you understand how important identity and belonging are. You understand how all-encompassing desire is, and you understand the pain and impact of friction on your everyday life.

AI has never been a freshman in high school and looked at a popular senior and thought, "Oh my God, they are so cool." and gone home to try on a new hairstyle that they can't possibly pull off.

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You probably want to grow your agency because of an identity that you wish to assume. You want the identity of somebody with ample financial resources, or you want the identity of being a respected organizational leader, or you want the identity of somebody who has figured out things that others have not.

Your broader audience and specific potential buyers are exactly the same. They are looking at the services you provide as a way to change their identity, fulfill their desires, or remove friction from their experience.

Let me give you an example:

If you are making that claim, you & your agency are assuming the identity that has mastery over advertising variables. (If we want to look a little bit behind that identity. It's likely that you Understand if you assume that identity, your desire for more financial resources is more likely to come to fruition.)

Your market or prospect that is responding to messaging almost certainly means that they have the desire to acquire more financial resources, and they want to remove the friction of potential failure.

If you are thinking that your market is too crowded or that buyers don't understand or that you can't get the kind of price that you think you ought to get for your services. It's because you are not truly understanding the identity, desires, and friction that your market is facing.

If you are thinking that you need to send out 10,000 cold emails every day, and spam everyone’s DMs, It is likely that you are letting your desire for a different identity and your desire for financial resources live at the forefront of your actions.

The thing that you must build into the culture of your organization is an open discussion about the identities and desires that you and your team are trying to assume and satisfy. When it's clear that you have a strong desire for more financial resources because it will allow you to create a different identity, you suddenly have clarity about why you are doing the things that you do. Some people on your team might have the desire for more financial resources, but they might have a bigger desire for someone to appreciate them and tell them that they are doing a great job.

Once you have this clarity around identities and desires, the actions that you need to take are more obvious.

At the very heart of DemandOS is the concept of Return on Understanding and the way that that expresses itself in your go-to-market, in your positioning, and in your messaging: you are responding genuinely to the identity, desire, and friction that your target market presents. DemandOS gives you the tools and the understanding to exist in the market and thrive without being manipulative, spammy, or high-pressure in any way. Learn more about DemandOS.

It is unlikely that you can have a deep discussion about identity and desire with somebody that you don't know. But, you can use your human powers of empathy and community to make really good assumptions about what a representative sample of your market might desire.

That’s the starting point for your positioning, your branding, your value proposition, and your go-to-market messaging. But because you are only targeting a representative sample, the actual message will address the desires of an individual hearing it differently.

You might desire more financial resources, so you imagine everyone in the market does. So you go to market with the "I will make you rich" solution because you think that will satisfy the market's desire for more financial resources. But as you have more market conversations, you might grow to understand that "I will make you rich" feels manipulative or disingenuous. Or you might find that "I will make you rich" doesn't feel comfortable for a lot of people, so the desire that they will try to satisfy is removal of temporal friction, or maybe removal of downside activity friction.

You get to learn that in real time & can adjust - and that's your job. That's why I don't think that marketing and sales are at any near-term risk from AI, because AI can't relate those questions of identity, desire, and friction to their own experience.

Embrace your own identity, desires, and frictions. Use your understanding of those things to create a workspace that allows your team to grow into their identities, fulfill their desires, and reduce the amount of friction that they experience. Then use that understanding to create effective go-to-market marketing and sales messages that learn and grow and adjust to the nuance of identity, desire, and friction that exists in the market. Marketing and sales are inherently human.

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