On Mattering

I used an AI agent to help me find a hotel room in New York City… and the results are reshaping how I think about what it means for humans to matter in an age of artificial intelligence.

It was a very simple prompt. I gave it the location where my meetings are… some very basic preferences (flight details, hotel rating, etc.). It considered everything… worked through the trade-offs I gave it, and recommended a selection of hotels in order of preference. The first one was exactly correct. There’s nothing even remotely impressive about what this agent did (including the handling of the booking). Very basic actions for agents that handle much more complex work. This week I was in Boston speaking at MarketingProfs B2B Forum delivering the latest version of my Marketing Forward keynote. I heard the same  message from session to session. Humans will provide value in marketing through the enduring advantage of trust, experience, knowledge, and judgment. It struck me… painfully… that none of those competencies were lacking in how this agent handled my request. It understood what I wanted, evaluated the options, made a recommendation I trusted, and acted on it.

What happens when the things we insist make us uniquely human are no longer uniquely ours?

Apparently, my hotel travel agent hadn’t received the memo. I started ruminating on this… not from what I, as a human, bring to these experiences, but more about how I felt as a customer. It made me wonder whether businesses are building their futures around a human distinction customers won’t care about? If AI can earn trust and demonstrate judgment… ummm… where does that leave us? We’ve become obsessed with identifying what humans can still do better than machines. What if our value is determined by something entirely different… what we mean to someone else?

The future of business isn’t about trust, judgment, relevance, or even experience… it’s about “mattering.”

Before you jump down my throat… take a beat… hear me out… a business can deliver excellent value and still be easy to replace. You appreciate the service… the price is fair… everything works. Tomorrow, something comparable comes along, and you switch without thinking much about it. Nothing failed… you just didn’t lose anything that mattered to you. Being valuable doesn’t necessarily mean being meaningful. Being useful doesn’t mean being missed. And being chosen once doesn’t mean someone cares whether you’re there the next time. It may be time to look not at ourselves but the other side of the equation. We spend enormous amounts of time defining our value from inside the business… our capabilities… our differentiation… our customer experience. Mattering gets decided somewhere else. It’s the same with AI. We don’t get to declare that we matter. The people we serve decide whether our presence makes a difference… and whether our absence would.

AI makes this very uncomfortable.

As personalization, responsiveness, and competent recommendations become easier to deliver, more businesses will be good at things that once made a business exceptional. That doesn’t make excellence optional… it makes excellence less conclusive. Trust can be earned through reliable performance. Judgment can be demonstrated through good decisions. Relevance can be calculated from data. Experience can be designed, measured, and optimized. But mattering is different. It asks whether any of those things have created something worth caring about… something that extends beyond the transaction. An agent might find twenty excellent hotels. What makes me tell it to book a particular one? Perhaps something about that hotel matters enough to become part of the instructions? That’s where the economics of mattering matters. If an AI agent can evaluate every functional advantage, compare every price, and eliminate much of the friction involved in switching, the businesses that survive purely on convenience or competent execution may become increasingly interchangeable. The question shifts from “Why should someone choose us?” to “Why would someone want to keep choosing us?”… and this is also about us… how we (as individuals) show up in the work that we do.

What are we asking all this intelligence to serve?

As agents make more choices for us, businesses will have to earn preferences people care enough to carry into those delegated decisions. Everything I’ve written and spoken about in relation to The Intimacy Economy might accomplish that, too. The future won’t be about proving what humans can do that machines cannot. It will be about taking responsibility for what we choose to make matter.

Stop evaluating your worth solely through your skills and capabilities… start thinking about how much what you do actually matters to the people you work with and the customers you serve.

If your organization is having conversations like this, let’s bring them to your next event. I work with teams and audiences to make sense of change, explore innovation, and decode what comes next. Book me for a keynote, leadership session, or conversation about the future of your business.