What's the point of people?

The perilous path ahead goes something like this. Automated production creates redundancies, redundancies mean less income, less income means less spending, and the system slowly eats itself.

Take it seriously. It may well be right. But do not let it narrow your field of vision, because every condition that makes it true makes a second reading possible, and a third, and more.

As automation and cheaper computing arrive, a great many businesses are reaching for the same bargain.

Do everything a little worse, as long as you can do it a lot cheaper.

Cheap, quick and just about good enough are not distinctive qualities. Which leaves a real opening for the few who choose to be better.

You might ask what this has to do with you (our clients, partners and friends). Potentially everything (if you're not the LLM), because your brand is the human edge of your business; the judgement, the relationships, the culture that holds it together.

Working through these ideas for our clients is why we stay optimistic. The job is to read the present and work it forward, into the possible, the avoidable and the desirable. So, as we say at Nonspace, stay open. On a subject this large, with this many people losing their heads, this is where the advantages can be found.

The thought trap

We have long agreed what a 'good business' is: productivity is output divided by people, and progress is the steady art of making more with less. For most of modern history that has served us well. But it is changing fast, and a gap is opening between business success and social success.

Mo Gawdat, former Head of Business at Google X, puts it bluntly. Automate to win, and you slowly dismantle the customer you were automating for.

We can see it. Where the great industrial firms carried wage bills of more than half their costs, today's most valuable tech companies in some cases run on just a couple of percent. It is progress that ignores a basic reality: workers and consumers are the same people.

Earlier this year Brett Falk at Pennsylvania and Gerry Tsoukalas at Boston University modelled what they call the AI layoff trap, and the cleanest answer their model found was a tax on automation itself.

A tax is a fair, reactive instinct, and a much-debated one. But, legislators and economists answer the logical question and leave the human one open. Which is the good news; the human question, the one that holds meaning, is exactly the opening for you to seize, improve and build on.

We have done this before

It's different but the same… mechanisation arrived in the eighteenth century with the same swagger and the same human fear. Mills replaced cottages, productivity by the new measure exploded, and people braced to be written off.

The answer, when it came over time, arrived as a wave of invention on many fronts at once. Unions, the spread of wealth, the citizen with money to spend who turned out to be the worker in another coat, cities, schooling, Marx, William Morris and a revolt against the soulless machine. Between them they were also the designers and builders of our world today.

Ironically, a world we now struggle to see beyond. So how do we...

The counterpoint

...see past the popular?

Good brand strategy is usually the discipline of the contrary position. What Marty Neumeier calls "when they zig, you zag". You go looking for the blindspot, name it, and own it first.

Productivity divided by people is one. The measure is exact, and it leaves out whether a company is building prosperity or quietly draining it.

In contrast, the same automation that lowers the demand for human labour raises the demand for human presence. When so much is fast, cheap and identical, the real and the organic come into sharper focus.

As every image is generated and every interaction simulated, value flows back to whatever is real. Perhaps not in the form it takes now, but with new relevance, appreciation, desire and need.

You can see it already, in the things that were meant to disappear. Print has shrunk and regrown in new areas, on demand and more personal. Direct postal marketing shows incredible conversion for GenZ. Vinyl is on its longest run of growth in decades. Live events are pulling record crowds, bigger than they have been in years and at a higher price point. Easy to dismiss as niche revivals; the point is the wider shift they signal. Call it business in real life; changed, certainly, but far from redundant. Value reimagined and refocused.

The questions start to turn human. Who is behind this? How many people work here? Is there a point to them, and can I feel it? Trust. Shared identity. Memory and satisfaction. Surprise. Uniqueness. Qualities that compound value.

The human edge

Your brand is where those questions get answered. A modern, professional word for something ancient and human; the symbols, the rituals, the sense of place, the story worth repeating, the network that holds people across generations.

It is what customers, talent and communities choose, trust, and want to be seen associated with. A story that fits with their ideas of what the future should be.

At that depth, brand is the operating system of the company. It is the culture of stories, symbols and contexts the business runs on, showing up in who you hire, what you price, and the work you take pride in.

This is where AI offers the most at the human edge, though the noise of the threat tends to drown it out. Call it A+AI, Artificial plus Actual Intelligence, put to work for more human to human, across B2B, B2C, Gov2C and the rest.

If the only shot you've got is 'a little worse for a lot less' you'll need to run faster on a road that will end.

My suggestion is not to think on the herd's terms; narrowing your opportunities, rather than opening them up.

Large language models, and soon the world models close behind them, only mean redundancy if we lose sight of what and who we are for, and how and why we do what we do. Hold on to that, and they become the baseline for progress; for getting better at what we do, for success that builds road rather than running out of it.

As you read and hear the language for 'what a company is for' wearing thin, don't be fearful, as a brand this is your opportunity to create real purpose.

To a growing extent people need to hear, see, and feel, from you, a future they're inspired to own.