By Sean Clarke, founder of PacificIQ and EcomIQ

I spend most of my day inside AI tools now, and every so often I look up and think, where are the people? It is a strange feeling, hours spent prompting a bot and reading its output, and it is a feeling your customers are having too. That feeling is quietly becoming one of the most important things happening in ecommerce, and most brands are running in the opposite direction to it.

Here is the shift worth understanding. The more of our lives move to talking with machines, the more people want something real from the brands they buy from. AI is a real advantage, and I use it constantly, but the brands that win the next few years will be the ones that use it to move faster while putting more obvious humanity in front of the customer, not less. So let me walk through that craving, why it is growing, and what to actually do about it.

The pendulum is swinging back

We are all more fluent in AI than we were a year ago. We prompt a bot, we get an output, we move on, dozens of times a day. What is interesting is what that does to us. The more automated the day gets, the more we notice, and value, the moments that are unmistakably human. As our Head of Strategy, Jennifer Courtney, puts it, the more AI works its way into daily life, the harder people crave real human interaction, because so much of the day is now spent talking to a bot and reading what it hands back. The pendulum swings both ways.

You can see it off the screen too. In our corner of ecommerce, in-person events are filling up and drawing real crowds, at exactly the moment you might expect everyone to be content behind a keyboard. That is not a coincidence. It is the pendulum. The more normal the machine becomes, the more a real human moment stands out, and the more people will pay to feel it.

Customers can feel the difference, and it’s becoming more noticeable 

The flip side of wanting the human is a sharp radar for the absence of it. Customers now spot the content that no person ever really touched, and it lands badly. Jennifer calls it the ick, that feeling when you can tell something went into the world without a human reading it first, and once you feel it you cannot shake it. Imagine that being someone's first impression of your brand.

Someone on my team, Anna, saw this play out recently. She bought a birthday present for her daughter from a toy company called Octoplush. The order qualified for a free gift on a minimum spend, and the free gift never turned up. She was not especially bothered, but she had quietly filed it away: they did not do what they said they would, so she probably would not buy from them again. That is how most of these end. The customer says nothing and simply does not come back.

Then the company reached out, and because they asked, she mentioned the gift that never arrived. In the same email, almost in passing, she mentioned the name her daughter had given the new toy. That small detail is where it turned. Every follow-up after that came back personal: written like a person who had actually read her email, checking in more than once, using her daughter's name and the toy's name as if they knew them. Then the parcel arrived, addressed to her daughter, not to Anna. The missing gift got sorted along the way, but that was never the part that stuck. What kept her was being treated like a person rather than an order number, right down to the name on the box. A brand she had quietly written off is now the first place she'll go next time. None of that took more automation. It took a person paying attention.

This is the part most brands miss. The point of keeping humans in your content is not only quality control, although it is that. It is that people are actively looking for the human, and they reward it. A reply that sounds like a person wrote it, a founder who shows up on camera as themselves, a note in the box that reads like it came from someone who cares, these register now more than they did two years ago, precisely because so much else does not.

Authenticity is the strategy now

For a long time authenticity was a nice word brands used on their about page. It is turning into an actual advantage. When a customer's day is full of automated, optimised, machine-shaped interactions, the brand that feels human becomes the one they remember and trust. That is not soft. It is the thing that separates you when everyone has access to the same tools and the same speed.

The trap is thinking AI and humanity are opposites you have to choose between. They are not. Jennifer frames the balance well: human decisions, human strategy, and human content still lead. AI speeds up how fast a person can decide and put things into the world, but the human element is the part you cannot drop. Use the machine for speed. Keep the human for everything that touches the customer's heart. That combination, fast behind the scenes and unmistakably human out front, is the whole game right now.

Where to put the human on purpose

Craving is only useful if you meet it. Here is where a growing brand can add obvious humanity without slowing down, using AI to buy back the time to do it.

Start with the moments a customer reaches out. Support emails, DMs, a complaint. These are the highest-value human moments you have. A real, generous, human response at a point of friction turns a near-cancellation into loyalty. Anna's toy company is the small proof of it. Let AI draft and organise if you like, but the customer should feel a person on the other end.

Then there is the founder's actual voice. People buy from people. A founder showing up on camera as themselves, or writing in their own voice, is something no competitor can copy and no model can fake. This is your unfair advantage, so use it.

The unboxing and the follow-up count too. A note in the box, a thank-you that sounds written by a human, a small unexpected touch. These land harder now because so little else in the customer's day does.

And keep a final human read on anything AI helped make. Before it reaches a customer, a person decides this sounds like us and this feels human. AI can produce the draft. A human owning that final call is what keeps the humanity in, and the ick out.

The point is not less AI. It is a humanization layer on top of it. 

None of this is an argument against AI. I use it constantly, and it has changed how much one person or one small team can get done. The argument is that its rise raises the value of everything human, not lowers it. As the machine handles more of the work, the human moments become rarer, and rare is exactly what people are hungry for.

Let the tools carry the speed, and spend the time they give you back on the things only a person can do. Show up as yourself. Answer like a human. Put a real hand on what reaches the customer. That is what people are craving right now, and the brands that give it to them are the ones that will be remembered.

A few EcomIQ pieces go deeper on getting this balance right: why AI confidently gives you the wrong answer covers keeping a human hand on what the machine produces. The prompts to run every week on purpose is the human-directed routine that buys back your time. And what leadership actually looks like in a growing brand is about leading the people who create that human touch.

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