We explore how AI is rewiring human behavior, why that matters for marketing, and what to do when assistants give one answer and customers feel “cared for” by algorithms. Mark Schaefer shares practical plays on AI discoverability, PR mentions, and building brand overrides.
• 300 futurists on AI’s impact by 2035
• cognitive offloading and customer de‑skilling
• synthetic empathy in sales and service
• AI discoverability, transcripts, and entity clarity
• overrides via word‑of‑mouth and brand loyalty
• mentions over backlinks and PR’s resurgence
• urgency as one‑answer interfaces emerge
• self‑publishing for speed, control, and revenue
• enduring marketing fundamentals, shifting behavior
• trust risks, deepfakes, and transparency moves
• experimentation habits and the power of community
Both our books, mentioned in the podcast episode, are available on Amazon:
How AI is Reshaping Marketing and Customer Behavior by 2035
AI is not just a new tool in the marketing stack; it is a force that is reshaping the human beings on the other side of our campaigns.
The Psychology of AI-Mediated Behavior
Cognitive Offloading Goes Mainstream
When hundreds of futurists converge on the question of how AI will change humanity by 2035, the consensus is less about prompts or platforms and more about psychology. Cognitive offloading is moving from shared life tasks to a mass phenomenon. When people delegate research, writing, and even emotional labor to models, their habits shift. Decision speed changes, tolerance for ambiguity drops, and the bar for personalization rises.
If customers outsource thinking, marketers must reframe value: clarity over complexity, immediate usefulness over cleverness, and brand assurance over feature lists. The subtle shift is staggering: your customer still buys with feelings and justifies with facts, but those feelings are now sparked or soothed by an algorithm's perceived empathy before you ever show up.
The De-Skilling Effect
De-skilling is the quiet engine of this change. In human partnerships we divide tasks; with AI, we offload cognition. The student who drafts every reply with a model is not an outlier but an early signal. Over time, we risk losing the reflexes that once made us resilient decision-makers.
This matters for marketers because friction points move. Long-form comparison pages may be bypassed by a single recommendation. Nuance that once nurtured trust may be truncated into a synthesized summary. To serve these rewired minds, content must expose crisp, structured signals that models can parse and surface: explicit definitions, step-by-step instructions, transparent pricing, and verifiable claims. Yet we cannot write only for machines. Humans still crave voice, narrative, and care. The balancing act becomes strategic: embed rich, precise text for AI while maintaining human resonance through story and tone so that when people do land with you, they feel welcomed, not processed.
Synthetic Empathy and Customer Expectations
When Algorithms Simulate Care
Synthetic empathy upends service and sales. Algorithms do not care, but they simulate care with tireless patience, calibrated questions, and tone control that many brand reps struggle to sustain. That illusion of empathy changes buyer expectations. If a bot can be endlessly attentive, why can't your brand?
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Pairing Humans with AI Co-Pilots
The implication is not to swap people for prompts; it is to pair the two. Equip teams with co-pilots that surface context, customer history, and next best questions in real time so human agents can deliver real empathy faster than synthetic empathy feels. In sales, this means rethinking discovery: shorter forms, richer first calls, and proactive follow-ups powered by AI that never forgets, while humans anchor outcomes in sincerity and accountability. If you do not scale the feel of care, prospects will default to the channel that does—even when it isn't truly caring.
Discoverability in the Age of AI
Text-First Content Strategy
Discoverability is being rewritten by AI's appetite for text. Large models prefer structured, explicit language; video and audio are expensive to parse and often ambiguous. The practical answer is not to abandon podcasts or video, but to flood the zone with authoritative transcripts, detailed show notes, and chaptered summaries. Treat every episode or clip as a source document with names, entities, definitions, and claims spelled out.
Freshness still matters—consistency is oxygen for AI retrieval—so publish often and update meaningfully. At the same time, prepare for one-answer interfaces. Unlike search results that offered ten blue links and a fighting chance, AI assistants tend to yield a single recommendation.
Winning the Single Recommendation Slot
To win that slot, emphasize two levers: entity clarity and external validation. Make your brand, people, products, and locations unambiguous on-site and across profiles, and seek third-party mentions that ground your authority in places models weigh heavily.
PR's Renaissance in AI Discovery
From Backlinks to Brand Mentions
This ushers in PR's new relevance. Classic SEO prized backlinks as votes; AI systems lean on mentions as signals of association and expertise. When reputable outlets, trade journals, and academic sources mention your brand next to target topics, models learn to pair your name with those intents. That does not make backlinks obsolete, but it shifts effort toward narrative placement.
Building Durable Authority Signals
Pitch data stories, contribute expert quotes, and publish original research with clean methodologies. Aim for citations in analyst notes and government datasets where possible; these sources carry durable weight. Over time, your topical graph strengthens, raising the odds that assistants surface you when users ask.
The urgency is real because windows close. Just as early bloggers entrenched domain authority, early movers in AI-friendly authority will define default answers. Waiting may relegate you to a shrug from the machine.
The Human Override Factor
Brand Affinity as the Antidote
Even as machines mediate discovery, human overrides will decide outcomes. When an assistant proposes five hotels, a traveler still chooses Marriott for familiarity or a friend's tip for trust. Brand affinity and word-of-mouth become the antidote to one-answer tyranny. Invest in experiences that create lasting connections and memorable moments that no algorithm can replicate.