Your AI Insurance Policy is Your Personal Brand

But what I want to dive into today is a conversation that keeps coming up in everything that I do.

So any podcasts that I guest on... panel opportunity, even me networking at events, I'm always asked this question about personal branding and AI.

What happens to a personal brand with the rise of AI? And I'm always assuming that when people are asking that question, it's because we know that AI clones are a thing, that people...

are falsifying their lives through AI generated images or videos or even falsifying how they look, which back in the day was just called Photoshop.

So that one's not new.

But I think people are asking this AI question because they genuinely wonder, what is the point of investing in a personal brand if it's not going to matter in a couple of years? And that's why I actually love personal branding so much because to me, I actually think it is one of the main marketing strategies because that's what personal branding is, a strategy.

To me, it's one that's going to stand the test of time because if we live in a world where... everything is AI generated, then how do we start to decipher what's real and what's not? And at the end of the day, it comes down to who have you met in real life? And I think that's the biggest point of confusion, right? We think that personal branding exists online in our online presence.

But that is just half of it.

The other half is you as a human in person, connecting with people at events, speaking on stages, building real relationships.

So i think that's what we forget because so often we like distill ai down or we distill personal branding down to social media content but really social media content is just one tactic within your larger personal branding strategy so what i wanted to chat about today is well how do you safeguard your personal brand against the rise of AI? And how do you actually use your personal brand as an insurance policy against AI when maybe your competitors or people around you are actually using AI as a tool to either enhance or falsify or generate a life and a personal brand that actually isn't true? which is dark, right? But this, I mean, you know, it's interesting because we talk about this as being like a new development of AI.

But for years, since we've had social media, there have been people, countless people, you know, thousands, millions who show up a certain way online and then live a completely different life behind the scenes.

So AI doesn't really change that, right? Like, to me, it just amplifies a problem that already exists.

But if you are a personal brand, you have the ability to start to form a very, very human connection with your audience.

And that human connection is what's going to take you so much further than the people who are just using their AI clones to like, talk about their expertise on the internet.

And that's actually one of the biggest things that I see right now with people who think they've built their quote-unquote personal brand, but there's a lack of human element to it.

And I think I talked about this on a recent episode where...

We've gone so far into the like wanting to be an expert, an authority, a thought leader that we can fall into this trap of creating content that's all like a talking head, you talking at the camera about, I don't know, your expertise, your frameworks, what you believe in in your industry.

And that content is really, really important, but it cannot be your entire feed.

And if it is, that might be why you're starting to suffer from a lack of engagement.

Because to be honest, people are not following you at this point to like learn tips and tricks.

They're not.

Social media content is meant to be storytelling.

It's meant to form a connection.

The tips and the tricks come when maybe someone... listens to your podcast or reads your book.

But if you really want to engage someone, you've got to get them on board with your story.