Back in 2024, my team at Blacfox was building a campaign for a client in enterprise software.
We were under time pressure. The client wanted positioning work, and wanted it fast. Positioning only holds up when it is grounded in what the market actually says. The honest way to get that is to go and ask. Interview buyers. Read the transcripts. Write down the words real people use for the problem they are trying to solve. It is thorough work.
And under the pressure, a member of my team decided to speed it up. He asked an AI to review the market’s feedback for us. The model swept up everything public about the category. Analyst reports. Vendor whitepapers. Blog posts. Review sites. It stitched all of it into a clean, well-structured summary of what the market wanted. It was articulate. It was balanced.
We built the campaign’s messaging on it. The campaign failed. Completely and undeniably.
The client, understandably, wanted to know what had gone wrong. So we did what we should have done at the start. We went back to actual buyers. We called them. We listened.
What we heard sounded almost nothing like what the AI had told us.
The summary said the market cared about seamless integration and total cost of ownership. Crisp. Logical. Exactly what a sophisticated buyer is supposed to say. Except the buyers were not saying it. The vendors were. The machine had remixed the sellers’ story and presented it as the buyers’ reality.
Integration and total cost of ownership are real things to want. They are solutions, and they are the public language of the category. Neither one is a feeling.
The real buyers talked about something else entirely. They were terrified of data migration. They talked about the political risk of championing a platform switch that might fail in public. They did not trust their own teams to actually adopt a new tool. Emotional. Varied. Messy. And worth the entire engagement.
Those three are feelings. Power Listening calls a feeling like that an emotional root: the emotion that can drive a want. None of it appeared anywhere in what the machine had read, because buyers do not publish their fears. They say them in private, to someone who asks. Some of these buyers had never said them out loud at all until we asked.
We had built our campaign on a hallucination. Not the AI’s hallucination. Ours. We had hallucinated that a synthesis of public content was the same thing as market intelligence. It was a well-structured fiction, and we paid full price for our error.
I am telling this story now because that fiction has since become an industry.
In August, researchers from Harvard and MIT published something called MatrAIx. It is a set of 8.3 billion AI personas, roughly one for every person alive. The idea is that you can test your product, your app or your agent on this synthetic population instead of on real people. Around it, builders are wiring up listening systems for machines. There are protocols so agents can hear each other. There are preference databases, so your agent can look up what “you” want without ever interrupting you.
Bit by bit, commerce is being lured into consulting a copy of humanity instead of humanity itself.
I did not want to argue with that from an armchair. So I have been field testing it aggressively, across a sample of 500 humans in the United States. That research deserves its own articles, and it will get them later in this series.
In my last essay I argued that human desire is the backbone of commerce, and that machines know nothing of desire. That’s important context for this conversation.
Back to the copy of humanity. Call each copy a proxy: a stand-in that speaks for a person, so you never have to talk to the person. It is a tempting trade. And the pitch has real charm. After all, who still needs to listen to actual people? That is so 1999.
But, sadly, a proxy of a person is not the person. It is an interpretation. It is somebody’s retelling of what the desire is really about. Here, the “somebody” is an AI model. Listen to the machine version of your buyer and you are standing one step away, at least, from the human whose desire is the reason you are in business.
At one step away, appeasing that buyer becomes a game of chance. Appeasing means giving people what they want, and you are betting on some AI’s account of what they meant. The AI retelling we trusted in 2024 was fluent about everything except the three fears that decided the deal. Those fears were the part AI struggled to convey, because a fear is a feeling.
And there is something bigger here than appeasing. Waking desire is the work of commerce. It is where the money lives. Nobody buys the big, considered thing because they woke up wanting it. Somebody understands the buyer well enough that what gets said resonates, and the buyer takes action.
You influence someone when what you say resonates with them. What you say resonates when you truly understand them, all the way down to the feeling. And that understanding is exactly what a proxy can never give you. Resonance does not travel through an interpreter. There is no influence at arm’s length. You cannot influence a desire you yourself cannot feel.
Stated wants are the raw material of all good marketing. These are based on decisions buys have already made. “I want a Volvo” or “I want a Rolex.” Gather enough of what people say they want and you can make powerful inferences about how to position to that market. But the stated want is only part of the story. Where is the emotion that drives that want?
An underlying feeling comes first, then what the person wants emotionally, and then the particular thing they ask for. My buyers asked for integration and total cost of ownership. That was the third layer, the thing, the stated want. Underneath sat the first layer: fear of a botched migration, fear of championing a failure in public, fear of a team that would not adopt.
Two buyers can ask for the same thing for completely different reasons. The reason is where the deal is decided, because hearts and minds change at the level of feeling.
And the feeling is rarely stated in those words. Nobody says “I am afraid of championing a failure in public.” They say something near it, and a human who is listening reads the emotion in what they actually said. That reading is an interpretation, and it belongs to a person. It is not a quote you can lift off a page, and it does not survive being averaged. If half your market is frightened and half is frustrated, the answer is not a blend of the two.
A proxy can hand you the stated want. It cannot hand you the feeling underneath it.
Follow the logic one step further and it turns commercial. When everyone runs the same models, everyone’s machine holds the same words. Intelligence stops being an advantage and becomes a utility, like electricity.
What you cannot buy off a shelf is the felt understanding of what your buyers are actually feeling, because that understanding only forms between humans in real contact. Your competitors can generate everything you can generate. They cannot feel your market for you.
That understanding is the last asset you can truly own in the agentic economy, and it belongs to whoever is close enough to feel it.
Before you decide I am against machines, look at the other half of my ledger, because I delegate to AI generously.
It drafts some of my emails and my proposals. It formats my documents. It generates variations. It tightens my language. It clips and summarises what I produce. It does all of it brilliantly.
The line I hold is the source. Here is the policy, and you are welcome to copy it word for word.
AI may process real market evidence. It may transcribe, search, sort, compare and summarise the actual words of real people, at a width no team could reach on its own. It may never invent that evidence, and it may never become the source.
This is the chain I have argued for years, and the AI proxies change nothing about it: Income comes from value. Value comes from understanding. Understanding comes from listening.
Value is perceived by a buyer when the thing you offer factually answers what the person wants emotionally. Get that right and the market sees value rather than hearing you describe it. That is why true human listening is the secret weapon of the agentic era. It is the only thing that produces the understanding that all of commerce runs on.
So to know human desire, we must listen to humans. Not to machines. Not to the machine version of humans.
Here is the drill. It takes one meeting. Open the deck, the plan or the playbook you are running right now. For every claim it makes about your market, write two things in the margin. First, the actual words a real person said, in their language, not yours. Second, underneath, your own assessment of what those words mean emotionally.
Keep the two apart on the page, because they are two different things. The words are evidence. The reading is interpretation, and interpretation is a human job.
No human words behind a claim, and the claim is synthetic, whoever wrote it. It makes no difference whether it came out of a conference room or out of an AI model. Count the synthetic claims. That margin is your listening scorecard, and your income is already reflecting it.
The machines will run more of the world every year. Let them.
When your market speaks its wants, be the one close enough to feel the emotions underneath them.
Make it rAIn, KG