Is AI Missing A Soul?

Part 1: AI Is Missing A Soul

I remember the first time I used AI

It was over Christmas in 2022, home for the holidays, and I typed my first prompt into ChatGPT. I watched a complete thought melt on the page, fully formed, in a way I had never seen before. I was hooked from that moment.

When I got back to California, I set out to write a beginner’s guide to product management, start to finish. I had released my first book on Amazon just months before and I thought, let’s do it again, but faster. I learned something quickly: AI was not ready to write a book.

Fast forward to today, and here is the part that surprises people. AI still is not ready to write a book. Not because it can’t. It is incredibly capable. It can do the research, structure the chapters, draft every page, and produce something that looks complete. The problem is that no one would want to read it.

The reason, I believe, is simple. AI is missing a soul.

What I mean by that

“Soul” is a metaphor, but it is the most honest word I have for it. Watch what has happened to the internet since 2022. A flood of content has arrived, and a lot of it shares the same fingerprint: a patterned flow, a smooth and confident surface, and nothing underneath. It is technically fine and completely forgettable.

Human-created content feels different. You can sense it. It tells a story, it takes a position, it has a point of view that came from lived experience. The more generic AI content fills the feed, the more I find myself craving the human stuff that actually speaks to me. Something clicks, and that click is the thing AI has not learned to manufacture.

That is not an argument against AI. We use it every day at WebVitality. It is an argument for being deliberate about where AI belongs and where it does not.

The trap most businesses are walking into

Here is the mistake I see again and again. A business discovers that AI can produce content, so it points AI at everything and ships the output. For a few weeks it feels like a superpower. Then the audience stops responding, because the work reads like everyone else’s work. Volume went up. Trust went down.

Capability is not the same as credibility. AI can generate the words. Earning a reader’s attention is a different job, and it still belongs to people.

That tension, what AI is genuinely great at versus what only humans can do, is the real story. It is what I want to dig into in Part Two, starting with how we actually handle it inside our own shop.

Part Two: The Human Renaissance

How we think about content

At WebVitality, we use AI in a lot of ways. It supports our team, powers new products, and drives efficiencies across the organization. But we have a hard rule about the work that reaches your audience: nothing ships on autopilot.

Every piece of content runs through people or is written solely by people. We work in tiers, with different levels of human involvement depending on what the piece needs to accomplish. Some work is lighter touch. Strategic, voice-driven, high-stakes content gets deep human ownership from the first idea to the final line. There is a human at the front of the process setting direction and a human at the back making judgment calls, shaping the voice, and deciding what actually goes out the door (there are humans in the middle also, training the AI on decades of human-written content in a specific voice).

That structure matters because of everything in Part One. The market is being buried in content that has no soul. Our job is to make sure yours is not part of that pile. The tools have changed. The standard has not.

Why people still matter

For two solid years, the headline was job loss. AI was going to replace everyone. Two years in, what I actually see tells a different story.

A lot of the corporate noise about AI is theater. Plenty of companies have integrated AI into their software, their products, and their pitch decks, but wholesale replacement of people has not happened. What I am watching instead is the start of a human renaissance.

Think about what AI is finally good enough to take off our plates. The repetitive, patterned work. Moving data from one spreadsheet to another. Mapping fields. Routine analysis. The tasks that quietly drain a smart person all day. For the first time, people do not have to do the work that drives them crazy.

That frees humans up for what they are actually best at: judgment, empathy, creativity, sitting with a client, closing a sale, solving the problem nobody scripted. We get to stop treating talented people like data-entry clerks and start treating them like the strategists they are.

I am not saying people matter because I want them to. I am saying it because, right now, they demonstrably do. The work that builds trust still comes from us. If that changes someday, we will deal with that day when it comes. It is not this one.

What this unlocks for a small business

This is the part I am genuinely excited about, because it changes the math for businesses like mine.

I can use AI as a lever to scale without piling on headcount I do not need. I can grow revenue without growing operational cost at the same rate, which is something only the largest companies could pull off before. It lets me hire strategically for the roles that truly matter instead of staffing up just to keep up.

And there is a second unlock. Most small businesses run on a stack of disconnected software, with valuable information trapped in separate tools. For the first time, we can connect those systems and surface insights that used to require a Fortune 500 budget. The visibility big companies took for granted is now within reach for the rest of us.

How to think about your own organization

If you want to put this to work, start with three questions.

First, where are people doing work they should not be doing anymore? Find the smart, well-paid person stuck shuffling data and you have found your first automation. That is the fastest win.

Second, where are the bottlenecks? Look for the spots where work piles up or stalls. Those friction points are where a well-placed automation pays for itself.

Third, where is your information trapped? Map the disconnected tools running your business. Connecting them is often where the real insight has been hiding all along. As small business owners, you survive by dealing with disconnected flows. You purchase software to help run your business but the software doesn’t talk to itself. We can connect it now.

Underneath all three is one principle. Let AI handle the repeatable, patterned work that demands speed, accuracy, and consistency. Reserve your people for judgment, relationships, and creativity, the work that carries a soul. Get that split right and you do not just cut costs. You elevate your team into the best version of itself, and you build something your customers can actually feel.

That, more than any tool, is the advantage.