No Longer an Empty Chair

While everyone obsesses over AI's automation powers, they're missing a critical opportunity of this revolution: AI isn't just making marketing more efficient—it's making it more human.

Sounds counterintuitive, doesn't it? We've spent years fretting that artificial intelligence would strip the humanity from our work. The reality? It's doing exactly the opposite. By handling the mechanical aspects of marketing that have consumed our days, AI can now create space for something we've been steadily losing: genuine human connection.

In Amazon's early days, Jeff Bezos would place an empty chair in meetings to represent the customer—a physical reminder that someone who couldn't advocate for themselves needed representation in every decision. It was brilliant, symbolic, and acknowledged a fundamental truth: marketing's primary role isn't just promoting products—it's championing the consumer throughout the entire organisation.

This consumer championship extends far beyond campaign creation. It means fighting for user-friendly product designs when engineering wants to add complex features. It means advocating for transparent pricing when finance pushes for complicated structures. It means insisting on intuitive retail experiences when operations prioritises efficiency over emotion.

Look at the most successful businesses of our era—from Apple to Airbnb, from Trader Joe's to Toyota—and you'll find this common thread. They've built consumer advocacy into their organizational DNA. Their marketing teams don't just communicate value; they help create it by ensuring the consumer's perspective influences every business decision.

But an empty chair can't tell you what it's thinking. It can't give feedback on your campaign concept. It can't tell you that your perfectly optimized landing page makes no emotional sense. It can't remind you that behind every data point is a person with hopes, frustrations, and dreams that your brand might somehow touch.

But what if the chair wasn't empty anymore?

I started my career as a sales rep for Unilever in Australia, selling tea and coffee. My marketing degree had filled my head with theories and frameworks, but it was those days in supermarkets—watching people shop, building end-cap displays, and having conversations with real customers—that taught me what marketing actually is.

Standing in those aisles, observing the micro-hesitations as someone considered a purchase, overhearing the quiet negotiations between partners about which brand to buy—these human moments were my real education.

Years later, moving onwards and upwards in my career, blessed to have worked on some of the world's most loved and admired brands, I found myself further and further from those moments of truth. The higher I climbed, the more abstract the consumer became. The more data we gathered, the less we seemed to understand the humans behind it.

This is marketing's great paradox: as our tools for understanding consumers have grown more sophisticated, our actual connection to them has weakened.

Here's where AI changes everything—not by replacing human connection, but by bringing it back to the center of marketing.

Imagine a meeting where instead of a symbolic empty chair, you have an AI-powered "consumer panel" that represents not just demographics and shopping patterns, but fully realised personas with attitudes, values, and voices that can respond to your ideas in real time.

Not sterile focus group transcripts or sanitised data, but the messy, contradictory, emotionally complex feedback that actual humans would give you.

What if your marketing team included:

These aren't simplistic personas based on superficial attributes. They're comprehensive simulations built from billions of real human interactions, capable of providing the kind of nuanced feedback that would take months of traditional research to gather.

The true power of AI in marketing isn't just in automation or personalization at scale—though those matter. It's in its ability to bring the voice of the customer directly into our creation and decision processes, amplifying marketing's role as the consumer champion across the entire business.

This isn't replacing traditional research. It's transforming it from a periodic, expensive exercise into an ongoing relationship with the people we serve, and equipping marketers with unprecedented evidence to advocate for consumer needs.

When your innovation team is developing a new product, AI can bring consumer perspectives into the design process from day one—not just as a final validation step, but as a guiding voice throughout development.

When your sales team is creating new channel strategies, AI can help predict not just what will sell, but what will build lasting customer relationships rather than one-time transactions.

When your retail team is reimagining store layouts, AI can simulate customer journeys that optimise not just for efficiency or spend, but for emotional satisfaction and brand connection.

When marketing truly champions the consumer across all business functions, AI becomes not just a tool for efficiency, but a mechanism for company-wide empathy.

The irony is delicious: the technology we feared would dehumanize marketing is actually our best tool for rehumanizing it.

By handling the mechanical tasks that have consumed marketers—the endless optimization, the channel management, the performance tracking—AI creates space for us to refocus on what humans do best: understanding other humans.

This isn't about replacing human marketers with AI. It's about using AI to make human marketers more human again.

So how do we actually implement this more human approach to AI in marketing?

The greatest businesses have always been those where marketing successfully championed the consumers they served—not just through communications, but by ensuring their perspective shaped every aspect of the company's offer. The most successful CMOs aren't just great advertisers; they're the voice of the customer in the boardroom, the product development lab, the customer service center, and everywhere else decisions are made.

As companies scale, this advocacy becomes harder to maintain. The layers between decision-makers and customers multiply. The pressure for efficiency can overshadow the need for empathy. Data can become a shield that protects us from the messy reality of human experiences.

But the companies that maintain this consumer championship even as they grow—think Costco, Southwest Airlines, IKEA—consistently outperform those who lose it. They find ways to scale their operations without scaling away their humanity.

AI is giving us the unprecedented chance to strengthen marketing's role as the consumer champion—not by replacing human understanding, but by amplifying it across the entire organisation. It allows consumer perspectives to permeate every decision, every design, every deployment of resources.

The most powerful question in business has always been: "What would our customer think of this?" AI is making that question easier to answer with depth, nuance, and actionable insight—not just in the marketing department, but everywhere it matters.

After all, we're not really in the business of products or services. We're in the business of serving humans. And sometimes, it takes a bit of artificial intelligence to help an entire organization remember that fundamental truth.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 20 March 2025 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.