The Unoptimised Human — When Competence Replaces Conviction

A monthly dispatch from the space between what algorithms optimise and what humans actually need.

There’s a pattern I’ve been tracking this month, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Everywhere I looked — brand strategy, marketing execution, banking, even the regulatory frameworks designed to contain AI — the same question kept surfacing: what happens when competence replaces conviction?

We’ve spent the last two years marvelling at what AI can produce. The copy is polished. The strategy decks are comprehensive. The social posts are on-brand. The code runs. Everything works. And yet something fundamental is missing: the reason any of it should exist.

This month on The Unoptimised Human, I explored this from every angle I could find. Here’s what emerged.

The Competent Beige Epidemic

I coined a term this month that seems to have resonated: Competent Beige. It’s what happens when every brand in a sector uses the same AI tools, with similar prompts, trained on the same internet, to produce outputs that are technically sound and emotionally identical. Three LinkedIn posts from three different brands, in completely different sectors, could have been written by the same person. Same rhythm, same safe tone, same vaguely inspirational sign-off. Polished, professional, and utterly forgettable.

AI doesn’t create. It averages. When you ask it to produce the most likely “correct” output, what you get back isn’t a point of view. It’s a probability. And when every brand in your market is running on probabilities, you don’t get differentiation. You get convergence.

Read the full piece →

Vibe Marketing: The Strategic Blind Spot

The “vibe coding” conversation has been one of the more interesting cultural moments in tech this year. Someone with no engineering background prompts an AI to build functional software. The output works. The code runs. But there’s a question underneath: if you don’t understand why it works, what happens when it breaks?

The same question applies to marketing, and almost nobody is asking it. Thousands of brands are doing the marketing equivalent of vibe coding every day. They prompt AI to generate campaigns, copy, strategy. The output is polished. Professional. It reads well. But underneath the polish, nobody has thought about why this content should exist, who it’s actually speaking to, or what it’s supposed to make someone feel or do.

Technical competence without strategic intent isn’t a strategy. It’s a liability.

Read the full piece →

The Confirmation Economy

In 2023, a Belgian sommelier bought a bottle of wine for €2.50, built an entire fictional world around it — elegant label, fake vineyard, borrowed lab data, weeks of social seeding — and entered it into a respected international wine competition. It won a gold medal.

The story isn’t about wine. It’s about how modern branding manufactures reality. We don’t discover truth; we construct it, layer by layer, until the confirmation becomes indistinguishable from the fact. And in an age where AI can generate infinite layers of apparent credibility, the construction gets easier and the detection gets harder.

The brands that understand this aren’t just marketing products. They’re engineering the context in which their products become the only logical choice.

Read the full piece →

Attention Architecture: What AI Still Can’t Do

In 2017, Google published “Attention Is All You Need,” the paper that introduced the Transformer architecture behind every major AI model today. The core idea: not every word matters equally. A system that knows where to pay attention will understand; one that treats everything equally will not.

Eight years on, we’ve built systems that can reason, write code, pass bar exams, and hold conversations that feel uncannily human. And yet there’s something they still can’t do: tell the difference between what matters and what merely appears to matter. Between signal and noise. Between the thing that changes everything and the thing that just looks like it might.

That’s not a processing problem. It’s a judgment problem. And judgment, it turns out, is the one thing that doesn’t scale.

Read the full piece →

What I’m Watching

The EU AI Act deadline (August 2nd) passed while I was writing this. The regulation is the most significant attempt yet to govern AI at scale, and it raises a question that most organisations haven’t grappled with yet: compliance is a floor, not a ceiling. Meeting the regulatory requirements doesn’t mean you’ve built something worth building. It means you’ve avoided being fined. The gap between “legal” and “good” is where the interesting work lives.

I’m also watching the accelerating collapse of brand differentiation in sectors that were early AI adopters. Financial services, higher education, professional services — the Competent Beige is spreading fast. The organisations that figure out how to maintain a genuine point of view while leveraging AI’s efficiency gains will define the next decade of brand strategy. The ones that don’t will wonder why their market share evaporated despite having better tools than ever.

The Question

Here’s what I keep coming back to:

If AI can produce competent output at scale, and every competitor has access to the same tools, what’s the actual competitive advantage?

It’s not the technology. It never was. It’s the human underneath — the judgment, the conviction, the willingness to have a point of view that might be wrong. The thing that makes a brand worth choosing over its identical-looking competitors.

Competence is a commodity now. Conviction isn’t.

What are you doing to protect yours?

David Chadderton spent his twenties and thirties teaching people how to make life-or-death decisions at forty thousand feet. He now applies the same principles to consumer psychology, which, depending on the brief, can feel equally high-stakes. He’s the creator of the STAR Framework and the author of The STAR Framework: Rewriting the Rules of Consumer Engagement (NYC Big Book Award 2025), The STAR Operating System: Decode Mindset, Understand Motivation, Transform Human Behaviour, and Dear Algorithm, It’s Not Me, It’s You. By day, a Chief Marketing Officer. By night, a behavioural science obsessive who writes The Unoptimised Human because he can’t stop thinking about why people do what they do.