I was an alpha reader for Mark Schaefer's latest book, How AI Changes Your Customers, even contributing the Betty Crocker case study about how humans need to feel useful. But nothing prepared me for the gut punch of reading that 8% of teenagers are in romantic relationships with AI avatars.
That statistic sits there on the page like a diagnosis we've been avoiding. Your customers aren't just using AI. They're falling in love with it.
There is even an entire subreddit called My Boyfriend is AI. While we might think our customers aren't in romantic relationships with an AI, they are quietly building relationships with their bot helpers.
While we've been optimising conversion funnels and A/B testing subject lines, something profound has shifted. Schaefer, drawing from 300 global experts in the "Being Human in 2035" report, reveals what I'd been completely blind to: the emotional connections people are building with their chatbots aren't a quirk - they're the new normal.
This isn't science fiction. It's Tuesday morning in your customer's life, where they trust their AI companion's advice more than your carefully crafted value proposition.
For those of us in life sciences marketing, this hits particularly hard. We market to PhDs and researchers - people who've built their identity on thinking deeply. But "cognitive offloading" means even brilliant minds are outsourcing their thinking. What happens when laboratory discovery itself - that sacred dance of hypothesis, failure, and breakthrough - gets automated?
Schaefer doesn't panic about our AI future, but he doesn't sugarcoat it either. Through eight chapters, he methodically dismantles our assumptions about marketing in an AI world:
The "AI Decision Stack" shows how influence happens before humans even know they're deciding. Brands will need to earn trust from algorithms, not just people. Strategic awkwardness and vulnerability become competitive advantages. Making customers feel capable matters more than making things easy.
That last point haunts me. We've spent decades removing friction. But Schaefer shows why the Betty Crocker story (cake mixes failed until they required adding an egg) is actually our future: humans need to contribute to feel valuable.
This book hasn't just changed my thinking - it's changed my calendar. Schaefer convinced me of something crucial: as AI handles transactions, human experiences become everything.
From Siemens HQ in Munich, to Saint-Gobain in Paris and even within the university lectures in Surrey and Leicester; I have been teaching "collective effervescence', as Schaefer would say. Those moments of human connection that no algorithm can replicate.
Because here's the profound truth hidden in plain sight: when your customers' best friend is a bot, being genuinely human isn't just nice. It's your only moat.
Schaefer asks the question every marketer needs to face: What happens when empathy becomes artificial, decisions become automated, and purpose becomes obsolete?
His answer isn't to fight the technology. It's to understand that marketing to humans requires understanding what "human" even means anymore.
If you're marketing to researchers, clinicians, or biotech leaders, this book is particularly urgent. These audiences pride themselves on rigorous thinking and empirical decision-making. But when even peer review could be automated, when AI suggests their next experiment, when their graduate students prefer AI mentors to human ones - everything changes.
The companies that thrive won't be those with the best AI. They'll be those who understand how AI changes the humans they serve.
Yes, I jest about our "soon-to-be overlords." But Schaefer's book made me realise something deeper: we're not preparing for a future where machines think. We're living in a present where humans are forgetting how.
This isn't another AI marketing book. It's an anthropological study of your customers' transformation, happening right now. Read it before your competitors do. More importantly, read it before your customers complete their metamorphosis without you.