The Business of Being Remembered: Why AI Makes Positioning, Purpose and Human Communication Matter More

Ask someone what they ate for breakfast yesterday and watch the pause. The meal was likely ordinary, one of hundreds much like it, and ordinary things leave little to hold on to. Artificial intelligence now produces the ordinary at no cost. Anyone can have a competent page by lunchtime and put a name tag on it and, surprise, surprise, nobody reads it. I myself read only positioned authors now, and I doubt I am unusual. Readers have grown sharp enough to notice, and the way the economy produces messages across every sector gives them plenty of practice.

That sent me looking for strategies and tactics for my voice and my clients' voices, combining deliberate work with the clever tricks of modern technology. I admit it felt like cheating, until you see that what makes a story work has little to do with a pitch-perfect sentence, and everything to do with simplicity, purpose and intelligence served with nuance on the side, making it an exceptional experience to have.

The first cornerstone of the philosophy, simplicity, comes from the diplomatic front line of the Commission's most human-centred policy service, where I led hundreds of consultations over several years and learned what complexity costs: time and nerves. Whatever success we had as a team came from two habits kept together: listening properly, then answering clearly. If the message did not land at the other end, you repeated it at your own cost until you got down to the simplest explanation there is. And voilà, success. Until it is as simple as 1, 2, 3, do what you may, but don't back down.

Before you can say what you do, you have to know why the message exists. The second element I do not compromise on is purpose. We quote visionaries such as Steve Jobs and Nelson Mandela for what they accomplished. What both had beyond that, and what readers keep returning to, was a purpose pointed at something larger than themselves, for the benefit of society in one form or another. It is deeply personal and deeply fulfilling, and it is also why we build, grow, deliver and chase, and why we choose to serve something beyond ourselves—including creating extraordinary messages that move people and get quoted.

AI is the word-producing layer. Editing is the human intelligence layer, and two things build that layer: experience and knowledge. My advice to anyone reading is to go down the rabbit hole of getting to know your métier and client first, read up on global subjects relating to them, get curious, and discover experiences, art, languages and cultures, then bring your understanding of them to share. What your message ends up serving will be a cupcake so unique you have sold it before the price tag was put on.

Those cupcakes take time to bake. Don't bake cupcakes from Dr. Oetker, please. We see lots of regular, sugar-fed slop. Slop is a product of laziness, and it becomes more obvious everywhere we go at rat-race speed, while everything that is actually worth our time is exceptional.

Nuance is therefore the last element, and the one in growing demand. The best way I know to describe it is breakfast in my favourite hotel in Basel. I get to be called madam while savouring a seasoned omelette with no yolk, because somebody anticipated it on request. You see none of the labour, and you would notice at once if it were missing. This is the other breakfast, the one nobody forgets.

Writing can be served the same way: the reader is the guest of honour, and every comma has been placed so that he/she can enjoy the meal without seeing the kitchen. In a medium that now produces words at no cost, that kind of service has become the scarce thing.

Raising a presence takes discipline and structure. SPIN holds the ultimate four elements that allow me to render the service I would wish to receive. The most important thing is to know what you would want to receive and to give it to the world.

That's all.