What artificial intelligence means for how we understand — and misunderstand — people.
When you might technologically be in the top 3 but you literally own the distribution channel, you have the keys for growth.
Something strange happened in July. Every piece I wrote seemed to circle the same drain.
A monthly dispatch from the space between what algorithms optimise and what humans actually need.
July was a month about filters. Not the Instagram kind. The kind that determines what you see before you know you're looking.
There's a paradox at the heart of AI-generated marketing, and it's this: the danger isn't that the output is bad. It's that the output is good. Good enough t...
Something shifted in July. Not a single event, but a pattern that became impossible to ignore: we've spent the last two years optimising everything with AI,...
Something shifted in July. Not a single dramatic event, but a pattern that became impossible to ignore: the better AI gets at optimising things, the more we...
We taught machines to think. We forgot to teach them what to notice.
There is a particular moment in every conversation with an AI chatbot that most people have experienced but few have properly examined.
A joint perspective from Homes for Students and VerbaFlo
On 2 August 2026, Article 50 of the EU AI Act enters full application. Here's what changes, what the research suggests about consumer response, and what it m...
Dear AI,
Last week, someone shared a screenshot of ChatGPT getting a factual detail wrong, and the caption underneath it — "And people want to replace humans with thi...
There's a Phoebe Gates AI shopping app called Phia that's been accused of cookie stuffing — claiming affiliate commissions for sales it didn't actually drive...
A LinkedIn thread this week revealed something more interesting than the research it was discussing.
I was on LinkedIn the other day and three posts from three different brands, in completely different sectors, could have been written by the same person. Sam...
Last month, Google announced its vision to transform Gemini into a "Universal AI Agent", a system that doesn't just answer questions but takes actions, makes...
Dear Algorithm,
24 notes for posting over 3 days (Day 1: 1-8, Day 2: 9-16, Day 3: 17-24). Max 120 words each.
📌 AI AND AI INTEGRATION
What happens when the algorithm assigns you a type you don't recognise? AI psychometric tools are classifying consumers in real time, without consent, withou...
The Roman Empire ran on infrastructure.
The UK ranks 57th globally for mobile network performance. That's not a tech problem. It's a strategy problem.
Starling Bank announced 130 job cuts this week. The reason wasn't declining performance, market contraction, or a restructuring born of crisis. The reason, s...
The wine experiment took weeks of social seeding, a fabricated label, a fake backstory, and a room full of Belgian sommeliers. An algorithm does the same thi...
Half of Chinese students use AI for almost everything. Four in ten American students don't use it at all. British students are somewhere in between. Our surv...
Student accommodation sells the first independent identity most young people construct. The room is not the product. The belonging is. And every STAR type ch...
The funnel is dying. Not gradually, not in the way that marketers have been predicting and then un-predicting for fifteen years. It is dying because the thin...
Prepared by: David Chadderton, The STAR Framework Date: June 2026 Version: 1.0
There is a piece of legislation that will fundamentally reshape how marketers use artificial intelligence, and most marketing teams have not read it. The EU...
📌 AI AND AI INTEGRATION
There is a piece of legislation working its way through the European Union that will reshape how every organisation on the planet builds, deploys, and sells...
Your brand has a new customer. It doesn't browse. It doesn't scroll. It doesn't compare tabs or read reviews at midnight. It makes decisions in milliseconds,...
The consulting giants are finally saying what behavioural scientists have been whispering for two years. The problem? They're solving the wrong layer of the...
Four articles. Four different angles. One uncomfortable conclusion that nobody wants to say out loud.
A behavioural perspective on why the brands that survive the AI revolution won't be the loudest. They'll be the most believed.
There's a moment, if you've spent enough time watching CGI films or visiting robotics labs, where something shifts. You're looking at a face that is almost h...
A marketing strategy built for humans is only half the job. The other half is convincing the machines.
It Can Write The Copy. It Can't Read The Room.
Klaviyo says its AI can segment your customers with a single sentence. It can. It just cannot tell you why they bought from you in the first place.
It can recognise the word "frustrated." It cannot understand the feeling. That distinction is costing brands more than they realise.
Pillar: AI and AI Integration
Seven principles that improve AI output by up to 20%. Not by changing the model. By changing how you ask.
The CEO of Google says humans aren't evolved for this much change. He's right about the conclusion and wrong about the diagnosis. The real reason is more spe...
A STAR Framework analysis of what happens when the tool starts shaping the user.
Why the most important role in your organisation probably does not exist yet.
Why generational surveys keep missing the real story, and what a mindset-driven approach would reveal instead
Why "human in the loop" is treated as a safeguard when it's often the source of the error, and what your mindset has to do with it
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, recently told the Financial Times something that should have made every office worker sit up straight. AI, he said, wi...
By David Chadderton
Why the latest enterprise data reveals a behavioural science problem, not a technology one.
There's a question I've been turning over for a while now, and it sits at the intersection of everything I've spent the last decade building. It's not a mark...
There's a moment in every team meeting where someone says something that changes the trajectory of the conversation. Not the big strategic revelation. Not th...
Action Fraud reports a 36% rise in football ticket scams over the past six months. Victims are losing an average of £215 each. The scams play out almost enti...
The largest student satisfaction dataset in the UK has a psychological dimension that nobody is talking about.
Accenture's 2026 Consumer Pulse survey dropped a statistic that should make every marketer sit up: 74% of consumers would trust a personal AI agent more than...
Google announced this week that it is offering free AI subscriptions to university students in over 140 countries. Students in the United States get a year o...
Meta launched something called Muse last week. They're calling it "the world's first personal AI agent built for everyone."
And how he should have written the letter instead.
Earlier this month, a retail experiment in San Francisco crossed what many in Silicon Valley heralded as a historic Rubicon.
There is a question that has been sitting underneath everything I wrote this month, and I did not realise it until I sat down to draft this newsletter. It is...
July was the month I kept writing about the same thing from different angles without fully realising it. Every piece circled the same tension: AI is optimisi...