I was recently invited onto Joeri Billast's Web3 CMO Stories podcast - one of the sharpest marketing shows running right now. Joeri has a gift for getting to the uncomfortable questions underneath the polite ones. He didn't disappoint.
He asked me why buyer insight keeps disappearing inside organisations. It's a question I think about constantly. Here's the short version.
You don't have a data problem
Most marketing teams in life sciences aren't short of customer insight. They have VOC studies, CRM data, win/loss notes. The customer insight exists.
What they're missing is customer presence - the buyer's voice showing up in real time at the moment decisions get made.
Customer data is a photograph. It captures a moment. Customer presence is having the buyer in the room when you're debating whether to soften that headline or add another approval round.
Here's what I've observed across far too many organisations: the people furthest from the buyer usually have the most approval authority. Legal, regulatory, senior leadership - all essential, none of them in direct contact with customers. So messaging gets adjusted for their comfort level, not buyer relevance. What started as sharp, specific copy ends up generic, safe, and quietly ignored by sales teams who know it doesn't match real conversations.
Organisational gravity is the culprit
Nobody decides to make messaging worse. But there's a structural force inside every organisation that pulls content away from customer truth and toward internal consensus. Every review cycle is another chance for that gravity to do its work.
Think about launching a rocket. You need escape velocity to break free and reach orbit. Most marketing never gets there. It achieves "low orbit": safe enough to get approved, invisible to the buyer.
In life sciences, this is amplified. Regulatory and legal review is non-negotiable - and it should be. But when those processes become the primary lens for messaging decisions, you optimise for risk avoidance rather than buyer understanding. The two goals are not the same. And conflating them costs deals.
AI as buyer proxy
The reason generative AI matters here isn't efficiency. It's interactivity.
Static personas get filed. You build them, brief the team, and three months later nobody's looking at them. They're a snapshot in a drawer.
With grounded PersonaAI - built from interview transcripts, sales calls, LinkedIn signals, brand sentiment - your buyer becomes queryable. You can bring them into a content review and ask: does this claim build confidence or create scepticism? What does procurement care about that we haven't addressed?
The persona can push back. It doesn't have a career agenda or a reason to say yes when the answer should be no.
That's the shift. Not AI as content machine. AI as buyer proxy - present throughout execution, not just at the research stage.
One principle I keep returning to: synthetic for directional, human for decisional. Use the model to stress-test your thinking. Validate with real buyers before major commitments. The balance isn't a limitation - it's good commercial discipline.
Your buyer didn't disappear because the market got harder. They disappeared because your organisation made them invisible - review by review, approval by approval - until what reached them had been edited down to its least interesting form.
The question isn't whether you have enough customer data. The question is whether your buyer is in the room when it matters.
Listen to the full conversation with Joeri Billast on Web3 CMO Stories.
