For twenty years, the way to build authority was simple: Know more than the room. Read the books, do the work, then explain what you know better than the next person.
That game is over. Hootsuite’s 2026 trends report says it all: AI-generated content surpassed human-written content for the first time. An estimated 312 million AI-assisted pages now go up every month, up from 82 million in 2024.
The machines know everything and will explain it to anyone for free.
This is the best thing that has happened to genuine experts in the last ten years.
When knowledge was the moat, the market filled up with people who read enough to sound credible. AI wiped that out.
The people with decades of real clients, real projects, and yes, real scars, are about to be easy to spot again.
Your task? To say what a machine could not have generated.
To the Person Who Never Cut Corners:
Picture the people using AI to fake a body of work. (You might remember Dave Stone from a few issues back, the guy who knocked off my book down to the orange cover.)
Imagine what happens when that gets found out. Imagine backtracking an entire reputation built on shortcuts.
You don’t have that problem. You never committed the crime.
Can’t you see this is amazing?
You never have to build another webinar page with 92 funnels behind it. You can send people a Zoom link and invite them to your webinar yourself, because that feels human. Human is the whole point now.
I’ve been in marketing a long time and pride myself on never having been a marketing bro. I don’t go to their events or use their tactics.
The marketing bro model is a glorified e-commerce store with an expert’s face slapped on it as a brand. That model is all but dead.
You? You are not an e-commerce brand. You aren’t even a brand.
You are more than a brand.
I know that sounds odd coming from the guy whose book is literally called You Are the Brand. But read even half of the first chapter and you’ll hit the most highlighted line (according to Kindle) and see where I’ve stood all these years:
“Don’t build a brand; become the brand. Do the hard work required to become the person you’re trying to sell to people. Embrace integrity. There is no shortcut.”
Here is a new filter I created to help my clients do exactly that. I call it POP:
- Personal experience
- Opinions
- Predictions.
Personal Experience:
This is more than anecdotes or personal stories, though those still matter. What are the lessons, the insights, the hard-won strategies that came out of your own lived experience? How did you actually learn them? What did you witness firsthand?
A lot of marketing experts say that personal stories repel customers. But look at who those people are writing for: small businesses, brick and mortars, e-commerce. Not service professionals. Not experts. Certainly not thinkers, writers, or creatives.
I’ve worked closely with some of those frameworks. They have their place but if you read and resonate with my writing, they probably aren’t for you.
You can’t sit on the bench twiddling your thumbs hoping you’ll be picked for your safe, bland messaging while a prospect uses AI to synthesize a hundred books into a personalized answer.
Too many people out there are misapplying the frameworks. It’s like buying an iPhone 15 case built for an iPhone 17. Same brand, looks close, still a wrong fit.
Opinions:
Express what you actually think or feel. Not the sanded-down, committee-approved version. The real one.
We assume a person with opinions is loud and brash. Nope. Everyone has opinions: food, movies, clothes, cars, politics, all of it. The gap is not between people who have opinions and people who don’t. It is between people who say what they think and those who self-censor, or never publish at all.
AI will never close that gap for you. I’ve coached a lot of people since AI came out and there has been no real increase in what they publish. Two main reasons:
- The content is safe and therefore bad, because they used AI… so they don’t publish.
- They have an opinion and are afraid to say it. This is not an AI problem.
Conviction is the signal of experience now, not intelligence. Say the thing, already.
Predictions:
Make a well-founded case for where things are going, and why.
This one carries risk. That is the point. No stakes, no ratings.
It’s why nobody watches the first-place team play the worst team in the league, while Alex Honnold free-climbing a skyscraper jumps to #1 on Netflix.
I think of AI as a calculator for words. A calculator doesn’t care if you fail your math test, and AI doesn’t give two craps whether you destroy your business or your life. It risks nothing because it is not alive.
(I am amazed how few people understand this and treat AI as an oracle of all things.)
If you’re risk-averse as a bonafide expert, here’s a thought:
We have been flattened into believing we must be certain about everything, all the time.
GPS is one way this happened. One small way I fight to retain my humanity is not use GPS around town. There’s a mall twenty minutes from where I live. I know five ways to get there. I do not need a computer to tell me how long it takes to drive a road I have driven my whole life.
Use GPS for every small trip, every small task, and we slowly train ourselves to believe we hold none of the answers and the machine holds them all.
You––yes, YOU–– are a genuine expert. You have answers. You have been trusted for years to guide other people through uncertainty. Go on the record. We need your wisdom.
A personal lesson, a signed opinion, a real prediction. That’s POP.
These flow out of a person who has something inside worth drawing from. So I’ll challenge you the way I’ve been challenging myself since AI arrived:
- What new creative discipline have you added to your craft?
- What are you reading that you would not have picked up three years ago?
- What are you doing to own your humanity in a deeper way than before?
This is the real answer to the tabloidization and the visibility fatigue I’ve been writing about. Not louder content, but rather a deeper person behind it.
You are more than a brand. This is the time to show it.
Mike Kim
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
Written with a Blackwing pencil, edited on a MacBook pro, published on my WordPress site, and emailed via Brand You Funnels (my whitelabeled Go High Level service). Graphics by Jason Clement.
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