The Human Part

This week, someone I really respect read a pitch deck I’d shared with her and told me, plainly, that it was bad.

Not “needs a little work.” Bad. In her words, it was the worst kind of AI slop: lots of words and graphics that said nothing.

I wrote back that afternoon. “Honestly, this is exactly what I was hoping for. It’s much more useful than a polite ‘looks great.'”

The deck was for an AI startup I’ve been advising, and she was right on nearly every point. But her sharpest note wasn’t about any one slide. She said the founders need to build the deck themselves, so they understand every word on it and can defend why it’s there.

That’s the blind spot. AI made the deck easy to build. It also made it easy to skip the part where a person actually stands behind it.

Think about how many business owners are in that spot right now. You can produce a website, a sales deck, a logo, an email campaign, even a working app, in an afternoon. Earlier this year I rebuilt an app idea I’d been sitting on since 2018 in about three hours. It’s still waiting for someone to wake up every day and run it, because the building was never the hard part.

Building is easy now. The human part is where the real work is.

The next day I was at the Digital Summit in Atlanta, and nearly every session came back to that same idea. One speaker shared survey data showing that 59 percent of people stop engaging with content they suspect was written by AI. Another walked through a list of words that now quietly sink a headline, because every AI tool hands the same ones to everyone. A third described how his small team uses AI agents like junior employees, and he was clear that the agents only work because a human is leading them.

I drove home thinking about building that kind of team for my own agency. I don’t have a big staff, and a few tireless junior employees sound pretty good. So I asked myself which part of the work I would never hand to them.

The answer sounds obvious. Human connection.

Friday night proved it. Our Night Market in Peachtree City came together because people owned their pieces. Volunteers marked the field before the first vendor arrived, a crew ran the stage, and the team made sure every vendor felt taken care of. I didn’t get home until almost 2 a.m., and no tool could have built that night. People did.

So if you’re using AI in your business, and you should be, here’s how to keep the human part.

The first way is to own every word. If AI drafts it, you finish it. Read it out loud. If you can’t explain why a sentence or a slide is there, cut it. Your customers can tell the difference, and many of them will quietly stop paying attention.

The second way is to put a name next to every piece. Before you launch anything, ask who is going to run it when you’re not in the room. Not who could. Who will. A great idea with no one behind it is just a nice-looking file.

The third way is to protect the connection. Let AI handle the summaries, the first drafts and the data. Keep the conversations, the follow-ups and the moments when someone needs to feel seen. That’s where trust gets built, and trust is what people buy. It’s also why The Nexus exists. Every week at Roundtable Tuesdays, Thought Lab Thursdays and Mindful Mondays, business owners sit in a room with real people who will tell them the truth, the way my friend did about that deck. You’ll get further with that room than with any tool.

So here’s my challenge this week. Pick one thing you made with AI recently, whether it’s a post, a proposal or a page on your website. Hand it to someone who will be honest with you, and ask them the question that deck couldn’t answer: who’s actually behind this?

That email stung a little. I didn’t expect it to feel so harsh. But it was the most useful thing anyone sent me all week, because a real person took the time to tell me the truth.

AI can build almost anything now. What your customers will remember is the human part.