The Intuitive Customer - Helping You Improve Your Customer Experience To Gain Growth

Customer experience has a credibility problem, and it isn't the ideas. Forrester has found that over half of CX teams can't prove the ROI of their own projects — and predicts one in five CX programs will simply vanish as a result. Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton sit down with the person who built the opposite case.

Maersk Line, the world's largest container shipping company, conducted one of the most successful CX implementations Colin has seen in over twenty-four years in this business — a 40-point Net Promoter Score lift. That translated into a 10% rise in shipping volumes. The project leader, Michel Patterson, wasn't a customer experience professional. Her background was Lean Six Sigma and statistics, and she built the entire program without ever opening a CX textbook.

What she did instead is the part worth stealing — including one leadership decision that should have sunk the whole initiative, and didn't.

"I really had to go in with sound research to show that this was true. This is founded in science. This is about a sound business strategy." — Michelle Patterson

• Why the person behind one of the best CX turnarounds Colin has seen had never worked in customer experience before.

• The move Colin made before Maersk had even agreed to the pitch — and why it ended the argument on the spot.

• The leadership call that should have killed the whole program, and instead created a groundswell nobody expected.

• Why having almost no budget turned into the project's biggest advantage.

• The unglamorous governance structure quietly doing more work than any dashboard — and why most organizations skip it.

If you've ever sat in a budget meeting unable to answer "what did this actually return," this episode is the corrective. It's not a framework pitched by consultants — it's the inside account of how one practitioner built the business case CX teams are still failing to build, nearly three years after Forrester first raised the alarm.

Resources Mentioned

Colin Shaw - https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinrjshaw/

Professor Ryan Hamilton - http://linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321

Connect with Michelle Patterson on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelpatterson/

Beyond Philosophy — Maersk Line case study (NPS up 40 points in 30 months, 10% rise in shipping volumes): https://beyondphilosophy.com/about/case-studies/maersk-line/

Forrester — 54% of CX teams can't prove project ROI; one in five CX programs predicted to disappear: https://www.forrester.com/blogs/predictions-2023-customer-experience-cx

CX Network, State of CX 2026 — demonstrating ROI and finding budget remain the top two barriers for CX practitioners: https://www.cxnetwork.com/cx-experience/articles/why-cx-budgets-are-won-at-mid-year-not-year-end

Medallia, 2026 State of Customer Experience Report — 66% of practitioners believe experience improved last year; only 17% of consumers agree: https://www.medallia.com/press-release/medallia-releases-2026-state-of-customer-experience-report/

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 89,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 760,000 downloads—and author of seven best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of the book 'The Intuitive Customer'. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan's new book was launched in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Before his first trip to Japan, Colin asked his mobile provider's chatbot one simple question — and the confident answer it gave him could have cost him a small fortune. It's a two-minute story, and it cracks open something much bigger.

In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton dig into why so many AI rollouts quietly make the customer experience worse, not better. Colin is convinced we've seen this movie before. Ryan brings a framework to the table — and Colin tells him, on air, exactly where he thinks it falls short. If you're putting AI anywhere near your customers, this is the conversation to have before you write a single prompt.

"There's nothing new under the sun — and we're rushing headlong into cementing poor experiences." — Colin Shaw

• The chatbot exchange that made Colin screenshot his own phone provider — and what it revealed about nearly every AI rollout happening right now.

• Why the real culprit isn't the technology — and the uncomfortable question most leaders never stop to ask.

• "Inside out" vs. "outside in": the four ways an organization can relate to its customers, and how to tell which one you're really in.

• The framework Ryan swears by for deploying AI — and the gap Colin thinks it leaves wide open.

• The one thing you must do before you write a single prompt — and why almost nobody does it.

Because "should we use AI?" is the wrong question — and it's the one most leaders are stuck on. In fifteen minutes, Colin and Ryan turn it into the questions that actually protect your brand. Come for the chatbot story; stay for the argument that follows.

Resources Mentioned

Revolutionize Your Customer Experience (Palgrave Macmillan): https://beyondphilosophy.com/books/

Ayelet Israeli, Harvard Business School — Israeli, Ayelet, (2025) "Generative AI in Marketing," Harvard Business Impact, 526022-PDF-ENG https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/526024-PDF-ENG

American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI): https://theacsi.org/news-and-resources/press-releases/2026/02/10/press-release-national-acsi-q4-2025/

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 89,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 720,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of the book 'The Intuitive Customer'. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan's new book was launched in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Colin asked his AI assistant one simple question — what time the film started — and it answered, confidently, wrong. A small thing. But it's the crack that reveals something much bigger.

A backlash against AI is building: data-center protests, job fears, "AI slop" everywhere. In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton ask the question most leaders are missing — what happens when that backlash reaches your customer experience? The answer runs through a psychological trap called the halo effect, a word you won't forget ("enshittification"), and one uncomfortable truth: the brands that win won't be the ones using the most AI.

"The best practice is this: you tell a customer when they're talking to AI, and you tell them when they're not." — Colin Shaw

• Why one bad AI moment can poison trust in your entire brand — the halo effect.

• "Enshittification": how AI deployed to cut costs quietly makes the experience worse.

• The transparency line every company will soon have to draw — tell people when it's AI.

• The real danger of AI slop isn't bad content — it's "voluminous mediocrity."

"Should we use AI?" is the wrong question. This episode gives you the right ones — where AI genuinely serves your customer, and where it quietly erodes trust — plus a way to think about it that protects your brand instead of gambling with it. Fifteen minutes now could save you a very public, very expensive mistake.

Resources Mentioned

Data Center Watch — local opposition blocked or delayed $98B of US data-center projects in Q2 2025: https://www.datacenterwatch.org/q22025

eMarketer — visible AI in marketing is four times more likely to cost brands trust than build it (Klaviyo & Datalily study): https://www.emarketer.com/content/visible-ai-marketing-four-times-more-likely-cost-brands-trust-than-build

Emplifi — more than half of consumers would stop buying after an inauthentic experience: https://emplifi.io/press/emplifi-survey-digital-authenticity-ai-report/

Cory Doctorow — the writer who coined "enshittification": https://pluralistic.net/

Ryan Hamilton, The Growth Dilemma (Harvard Business Press): https://store.hbr.org/product/the-growth-dilemma

Duolingo's "AI-first" backlash — Fortune: https://fortune.com/2025/06/09/duolingo-ceo-surprised-backlash-ai-first-company-announcement/

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 89,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of the book 'The Intuitive Customer'. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan's new book was launched in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton tackle the two processes that decide everything in customer experience: how memories get in, and how they get out. If you haven't heard Parts 1 and 2, start there — Colin and Ryan build on the "memories are structured like fishing nets" idea throughout.

Here's the uncomfortable truth at the center of this episode: a customer's memory of your experience isn't a recording you can trust. It's reconstructed, emotional, and easy to distort — and most organizations are accidentally reinforcing the worst version of it.

In this episode, Colin and Ryan cover:

• Storing memories — why memories live in network structures

• Retrieval — the Zeigarnik effect (why an active goal sharpens memory, and why it vanishes once the goal is met),

• Forgetting — storage decay, the biology of chemical traces

• The danger zone: misinformation — Elizabeth Loftus's famous "smashed vs. hit" car-crash study

• The "So What" — why making customers repeat their complaint makes worse memories,

Key quote: "We don't choose between experiences. We choose between the memory of an experience." — Professor Daniel Kahneman

Resources mentioned:

• Elizabeth Loftus on the misinformation effect: SimplyPsychology

• Learn about Memory Maker Training and customer science: email [email protected]

• Explore all episodes, free tools, and resources: beyondphilosophy.com/podcast

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 700,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Silos are the silent killer of customer experience — but for years we've only argued that from one side of the coin: the customer's. This episode flips it over. Colin and Ryan are joined by Dan O'Connell, CEO of Front, to look at silos from the side that actually moves a boardroom — the cost.

Front's new research, the Coordination Tax, surveyed B2B customer service, operations, and account management leaders and uncovered a startling baseline: the typical company spends nearly three hours coordinating work for every one hour it spends actually solving a customer's problem. Worse, 42% of companies don't track coordination time at all. It's the single largest cost in most customer operations, and almost nobody is measuring it.

Dan, Colin, and Ryan dig into why sophisticated software and AI have so far made the problem worse rather than better, why bolting AI onto broken processes just delivers "a bad job done faster," what the top 14% of companies do differently, and the practical steps any leader can take to start quantifying — and shrinking — their own coordination tax.

• Why silos cost you twice: once in customer experience, and once in raw internal inefficiency you're probably not measuring

• The three-to-one coordination-to-solving ratio, and why "normal" is far more expensive than leaders assume

• Why more advanced platforms and AI have inherited the coordination gap and scaled it

• The human cost: how coordination burnout quietly drives your best people out the door

• What separates the top 14% of companies from everyone else

• Practical first moves — measuring coordination, aligning cross-functional incentives, documenting the real process, and starting small with AI

"Teams are working around broken systems. AI won't fix that. Until companies address the coordination gap, the problem won't go away." — Dan O'Connell, CEO, Front

The Coordination Tax report is free to download at Front - Coordination Tax

Dan O'Connell is the CEO of Front, the customer operations platform built for B2B complexity. Before Front, Dan was the Chief Strategy & AI Officer at Dialpad, where he delivered the first set of generative AI features powered by Dialpad's proprietary large language model.

Since joining as CEO in March 2024, Dan has repositioned Front from a shared inbox tool to a category-leading platform for complex customer operations, leading the company past $100M in ARR in September 2025. More than 9,300 businesses rely on Front, which has raised $204M in venture funding from Sequoia Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Battery Ventures, Threshold Ventures, and Uncork Capital, as well as executives from Atlassian, Okta, PagerDuty, Qualtrics, and Zoom. Prior to that, Dan was the CEO of TalkIQ, a real-time speech recognition and natural language processing start-up acquired by Dialpad. Dan has also held various sales leadership positions at AdRoll and Google. He holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business.Follow Dan on LinkedIn

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 89,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 750,000 downloads—and author of seven best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of the book ' The Intuitive Customer '. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan's new book was launched in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton continue their deep dive into memory — arguably the most underused idea in customer experience. Because here's the uncomfortable truth: customers don't act on the experience you give them. They act on the memory of it.

Ryan introduces a brilliant analogy: memory works like a fishing net. Pull up one memory and you drag a whole network of related memories with it. Colin and Ryan then walk through the major types of memory — explicit, implicit, episodic, and the one that matters most for CX, evaluative — before landing on Professor Daniel Kahneman's peak-end rule and why it should sit at the heart of how you design every experience.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why memory behaves like a fishing net — and what that means for the moments you'd never think to design

• The difference between explicit, implicit, episodic, and evaluative memory (and why the last one runs the show)

• How habits live inside procedural memory

• The peak-end rule explained: why customers remember the most intense moment and the final moment, and almost nothing else

• Why a great recovery from a problem can build more loyalty than a flawless experience

Memorable moment: "You don't pull up one knot in the net. You drag the whole thing with it." — on why a single bad moment activates every adjacent memory a customer has of your category. Professor Ryan Hamilton

Resources:

• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

• Qualtrics XM Institute on the financial value of emotion: https://www.qualtrics.com/articles/customer-experience/capture-financial-value-customer-emotions/

• Beyond Philosophy's Memory Maker Training: https://beyondphilosophy.com/contact

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press. Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Nobel laureate Professor Daniel Kahneman said we don't choose between experiences; we choose between the memory of an experience. If that's true — and the science says it is — then most organizations are investing in the wrong thing. In this episode, Colin and Ryan explore how memories are actually formed, the difference between short-term (working) and long-term memory, and why your brand is really just a memory structure in the minds of your customers. They dig into how heuristics and biases shape what we remember, why humans are relentless pattern-recognition machines, and what all of this means for the experiences you design. It's the first in a three-part series on the topic Colin calls his favorite of all.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why memory — not the live experience — drives customer decisions, loyalty, and price tolerance

• The difference between short-term/working memory and long-term memory (and why most of your experience gets "binned" within seconds)

• How memories are stored as a connected network of "nodes," not isolated facts

• Why a brand, from the customer's point of view, is simply a memory structure, making brand management a form of memory management

• How customer expectations are built from memory, and what that means for "meeting and exceeding" them

• Where heuristics and biases come from — what's innate, what's learned, and what's situational

• The practical "so what" for designing experiences that customers actually remember

Key quote: "We don't choose between experiences. We choose between the memory of an experience." — Professor Daniel Kahneman

The hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press. Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

Resources & links:

• Kahneman, The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory (TED): https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory

• HBR, An Emotional Connection Matters More Than Customer Satisfaction: https://hbr.org/2016/08/an-emotional-connection-matters-more-than-customer-satisfaction

• Beyond Philosophy training & resources: https://beyondphilosophy.com

Episode Summary

Trust is the foundation of every customer relationship. But here's the uncomfortable truth: most businesses assume they have it when they don't. PwC's latest research found that 90% of executives believe their customers trust them highly — yet only 30% of customers actually do. That's a 60-point gap. And it's growing.

In this episode, Colin Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton from Emory University break down the five rules that are guaranteed to build genuine, lasting trust with your customers. These aren't theoretical — they're drawn from decades of real CX work, rooted in behavioural economics, and illustrated with the kinds of real-world examples that make you realise how often companies (and people) get this wrong.

What You'll Hear in This Episode:

• Why trust is earned, not given — and why that changes everything about how you approach customer relationships

• The authenticity trap: why trying to appear authentic is worse than not trying at all

• Why you should always tell customers the bad news early — and why hiding it always costs you more in the end

• The Fiverr story: how a supplier destroyed trust before they'd even started the job

• Why consistency and reliability are not soft values — they're heuristic signals that your customers use to judge whether they can trust you for the things that really matter

• How the "emotional bank account" works — and why you need to be in credit before something goes wrong

Quote of the Episode:

"The danger is people will be too strategic about authenticity. The point is not to act like you're authentic. The point is actually to be authentic."

— Professor Ryan Hamilton, Emory University

Resources Mentioned:

• Connect with Colin Shaw on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinrjshaw/

• Connect with Professor Ryan Hamilton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prof-ryan-hamilton/

• Beyond Philosophy website: https://beyondphilosophy.com

• PwC Trust in Business Survey: https://www.pwc.com/us/en/library/trust-in-business-survey.html

About the Hosts:

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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After more than a decade of companies pouring money, technology, and consultants into customer experience, US customer satisfaction sits almost exactly where it did in 2013. Flat. Now AI arrives as the promised cavalry — and leaders are racing to bolt it onto everything before they understand what they're actually trying to fix.

In this episode, Colin and Ryan separate the smart play from the slow-motion mistake. "AI-first" is sound management: if AI delivers a better, faster, or cheaper experience than a human, use it. But "AI-only" — AI sprinkled over everything like fairy dust because leaders are terrified of being left behind — is where companies quietly automate themselves into a commodity and erode the one thing they can't easily win back: trust.

Using the now-infamous "microwave test" (brilliant for the peas, a disaster for the steak), Colin and Ryan dig into why so much CX investment has produced so little, and why the companies that win the next decade won't be the ones that adopted AI fastest — but the ones who knew exactly what they wanted it to do.

• Why is a tool used without a strategy just an expensive way to make a bad experience happen faster

• The critical difference between "AI-first" (smart) and "AI-only" (reckless) — and how to tell which one you're actually doing

• The one question almost no organization can answer — and why you can't deploy AI well until you can

• How over-reliance on AI quietly costs you on two fronts: differentiation (the same prediction machine is available to every competitor) and trust (the moment customers feel they have to double-check you, you've lost)

• A simple, strategy-first decision framework for where AI lifts the experience and where a human still wins

The companies that win the next decade won't be the ones that adopted AI fastest. They'll be the ones who knew exactly what they wanted it to do — and never lost sight of the most important thing: the customer's experience.

• US customer satisfaction flat since 2013 — American Customer Satisfaction Index

• Research on cognitive offloading and weakening judgment — Societies, 2025

Colin Shaw is a LinkedIn 'Top Voice' with a massive 286,000 followers and 87,000 subscribers to his 'Why Customers Buy' newsletter. Shaw is named one of the world's 'Top 150 Business Influencers' by LinkedIn. His company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been selected four times by the Financial Times as a top management consultancy. Shaw is co-host of the top 1.5% podcast 'The Intuitive Customer'—with over 600,000 downloads—and author of eight best-sellers on customer experience. Shaw is a sought-after keynote speaker. Follow Colin on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book, "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things," Harvard Business Press. Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Summary

Artificial Intelligence is transforming marketing faster than almost any technology before it. Brands can now create professional-quality advertisements in hours rather than months and at a fraction of the cost. But as AI-generated creative becomes more common, an important question is emerging: Are brands becoming more efficient while losing some of the humanity that customers value?

In this episode, Ben Shaw and Professor Ryan Hamilton explore the growing use of AI in advertising and marketing. They discuss why customers may care less about how cheaply content is produced and more about whether it feels authentic, trustworthy, and emotionally engaging. They also examine why AI may unintentionally create a flood of mediocre content, why consumers often value effort and craftsmanship, and how marketers can use AI without sacrificing what makes their brands distinctive.

The discussion reveals that while AI is a powerful tool, it is not a substitute for customer understanding, emotional insight, or great strategy.

Best Quote from the Episode:

"The companies that win won't be the ones using the most AI. They'll be the ones using AI without losing their humanity."

Ben Shaw

Key Takeaways:

• Customers don't buy efficiency—they buy value, trust, and emotional connection.

• AI-generated advertising may lower production costs, but it can also reduce perceived authenticity.

• Consumers often use effort and craftsmanship as signals of quality and credibility.

• As AI-generated content becomes widespread, "realness" may become an increasingly valuable differentiator.

• Unlimited AI revisions can lead to creative dilution and "death by a thousand prompts."

• AI won't fix poor marketing strategy; it simply allows marketers to produce more content faster.

• Great marketing still comes from human insight, emotion, creativity, and understanding customer needs.

• The most successful brands will use AI as a tool, not as a replacement for strategic thinking.

Why You Should Listen:

If you're a marketer, business leader, customer experience professional, or simply curious about how AI is changing the relationship between brands and customers, this episode offers a balanced and practical perspective. You'll learn where AI genuinely creates value, where it creates risks, and why authenticity may become one of the most important competitive advantages in the years ahead.

Resources Mentioned

• Ben Shaw - https://www.linkedin.com/in/benshawuk/

• Professor Ryan Hamilton - http://linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321

About the Hosts:

Ryan Hamilton is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of 'The Intuitive Customer' book. An award-winning teacher and researcher in consumer psychology, he has been named one of Poets & Quants' "World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under 40." His research focuses on how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence shopper decision-making, and his findings have been published in top academic journals and covered by major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN. His work highlights how psychology can help firms better understand and serve their customers. Ryan has a new book launch in June 2025 called "The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things" Harvard Business Press. Follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

Ben Shaw is Group Head of Strategy at Smarts, a global PR and Creative agency. Ben also led strategy at BBH and worked client-side with fast-growth start-ups Wheely and Unmind. He's passionate about how brands can challenge culture convention and create ideas people want to spend time with, working on brands like Audi, Google and Burger King. Beyond advertising, Ben champions mental health awareness and rare disease research, drawing on both personal experience and professional curiosity.