People + AI: Not a Cost-Cutter — A Growth Engine

Seth Godin often reminds us: every great story, every winning pitch starts with “why now?”

Here’s why now is the moment to get serious about people metrics — and stop treating AI as a headline gimmick.

For decades, we built businesses by looking backward. Historic financials, prior year customer cohorts, and trailing averages. That worked… when the world was ‘stable’, and when we could afford to acquire a bell curve of customers — a few A+ loyalists, and plenty of Cs and Ds that churned out quietly.

Today’s economy is less certain, less designed based upon the past alone, every misstep — every misaligned hire, every mis-targeted customer — is expensive, immediate, and destructive.

• The C and D customers you acquire aren’t just low-value — they burn through your service teams, damage your reputation, and drag margins.
  
  
• The wrong employees don’t just underperform — they erode culture and momentum. They impact stock price as well as confidence.

We simply can’t afford to waste time or capital, and we can’t afford to waste people.

Here’s what the data tells us:

• Only ~6% of brands today are what we call “brand healthy” — meaning self-actualized, with a purpose clear enough to convert and retain the right customers efficiently.
  
  
• And that same lack of purpose clarity shows up in hiring: attracting the wrong mindsets, burning time, and payroll.

The media loves AI headlines: “Cut jobs! Save money!” But if we replace people wholesale, who exactly is left to buy anything?

AI isn’t here to hollow out humanity — it’s here to help people scale their creativity, decision-making, and alignment to the business’s purpose.

Just like the great inventions before it, AI is a productivity amplifier. It works best when paired with humans who know how to see the world through the customer’s eyes, make value-based tradeoffs, and use data wisely, beyond what any LLM can yet “understand.”

Businesses that integrate people + AI at the right stages, and align everyone toward a shared, clear purpose, are the businesses that will self-actualize faster — and win.

That’s the future we believe in:

• Smarter, more efficient customer acquisition by focusing only on A+ buyers.
  
  
• Smarter, more aligned hiring by understanding mindset fit and cultural impact.
  
  
• Smarter growth by letting humans + AI build together.

It starts with seeing people — customers and employees — as the critical data points they already are.

Why now? Because the world has never been less forgiving of the wrong signals, and never more ready for the right ones.