Personalization Is Not Intimacy

As a kid I thought it was so cool to see my name in a book.

I also realized that you could buy a Disney or Marvel character-based book with your name personalized in it. Wow, was that a cool gift. I’m guessing I never got one because they were way too expensive. Which leads me to this funny… and somewhat depressing… story in Wired about grandparents buying AI-generated personalized books for their grandchildren. It’s hard to argue that this is not an incredibly sweet gift. A story where the child is the hero… their name is in the book. Now, because AI has made personalization dramatically cheaper and easier, a kid’s face can also appear in the illustrations. Their dog comes along for the adventure… their favorite activities become part of the plot. It sounds like the perfect gift got even more perfect-er…

… Until the book arrives…

You guessed it… many of these now-AI-generated books are filled with awkward (I’m being kind here) writing, spelling mistakes, bizarre illustrations and stories that barely make sense. The intention? Beautiful. The execution? Ugh. And while it’s easy to laugh at the result (welcome to the era of AI Slop Books!), I think there’s a much bigger cultural and business lesson staring us right in the face.

We’re confusing customization with intimacy.

For years, marketers have promised that personalization would transform customer experiences. The right message… the right product… the right recommendation… the right moment. AI now gives us the ability to do that at a scale we could barely imagine a few years ago. We can create almost infinite variations of almost anything. But changing a few variables is not the same as making something meaningful. A child’s name inside a story does not automatically make it a good story. Their face in an illustration does not suddenly create emotional connection. A custom product is not necessarily a keepsake.

That’s the difference between customization and my thinking around moving from The Attention Economy to The Intimacy Economy.

The Intimacy Economy is not about knowing someone’s name. It’s about understanding what matters to them. It’s about creating something so thoughtful, so relevant and so emotionally connected that the recipient genuinely feels like it was made just for them (that the brand “knows” them). That feeling doesn’t come from technology. It comes from how we use technology to better connect with one another.

That’s why this story feels so important.

The grandparent is trying to express love. AI simply became the tool they chose to deliver it. Unfortunately, too many of these products assume that if the child’s name appears enough times, if their pet shows up on every page and if the illustrations vaguely resemble their life, the book somehow becomes special. It doesn’t. Humans are remarkably good at detecting when something feels authentic… and when it doesn’t. They may not articulate it that way, but they know when a story captures their imagination and when it simply captures their personal information (there’s also some rich privacy and safety lessons in here). They know the difference between a book someone carefully chose because they knew them… and a book that was generated based more on software variables than human values.

That’s a lesson far bigger than children’s publishing.

AI can personalize everything. Marketing… retail… healthcare… education… customer service… media. Every company (big or small) can now promise an experience tailored specifically for an individual. That’s exciting if the technology doesn’t lower the standard… but raises it. Consumers won’t judge personalization by how accurately you inserted their name and information. They’ll judge it by whether it made them feel seen. That’s the opportunity AI creates… and it’s also the trap. Companies will be tempted to produce infinite personalized experiences because they can.

The winners will be the organizations that create individual experiences that actually matter.

Because the future premium will not belong to infinite personalization. It will belong to the feeling the recipient walks away with. Whether AI helped create it or not will become increasingly irrelevant. What will matter is whether the experience felt thoughtful… relevant… intentional… and genuinely made for them. We finally have technology capable of delivering that kind of intimacy at scale. It would be a shame if we used it to make experiences feel cheaper instead of more meaningful.

Making another human being feel deeply understood is what this technology should enable us to do better than ever before.

This (and some other topics) is what Trudie Mason and I discussed on CJAD 800 AM.

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