The Trending Communicator

What happens to a customer's words between the research readout and the campaign launch? Usually they survive in meaning and die in language. Every review cycle sands off a little more of the emotion that made the insight worth having, until the market no longer recognizes itself in what comes back.

In this episode of The Trending Communicator, Dan Nestle welcomes back Dr. Matt Wilkinson, founder and CEO of Strivenn and author of The Buyer in the Loop. Matt's answer is the grounded synthetic customer: an AI representation built from a company's own interviews, CRM data, sales transcripts, and social listening that stays with the work from inception to launch and can trace every recommendation back to the evidence behind it.

From there, the conversation turns to why an "act as" prompt can't stand in for real customer knowledge, and to the book cover Matt tested on a synthetic panel and on LinkedIn at the same time. Matt is candid about where synthetic customers stumble, with a Montblanc pen and New Coke along the way, and he closes with how communicators can build personas for investors and even the lobby groups working against them. He also makes the case that all of this should send teams back to their real customers more often.

Listen in and hear about...

• Why organizational gravity can't be fixed one department at a time
• The difference between a one-page persona, an "act as" prompt, and a grounded synthetic customer
• How a synthetic panel and a LinkedIn poll split the same way on three book covers, then agreed on a fourth
• Why the half-life of customer research is shrinking in the era of zero-click search
• Where synthetic customers break down, from temporal drift to pricing and emotion
• How communicators can model investors, stakeholders, and opposition groups before a message goes out

Notable Quotes from Matt

"The ability to create stuff, everybody has it now, but the ability to understand your customer is one of the few things that really sets us apart." - Dr. Matt Wilkinson [06:05 → 06:54]

"Does the customer really care that you've been in business 20 years? Yes, they want a reliable partner to work with, but actually they probably want to know, what have you actually done for the industry? What have you changed? What problems have you solved?" - Dr. Matt Wilkinson [13:20 → 13:52]

"The thing about the grounding is it's twofold. One, that it is grounded in evidence, but secondly, it's grounded in your evidence. And that's where the real moat comes in." - Dr. Matt Wilkinson [29:53 → 30:33]

"It gives marketers the ability to start pointing at evidence rather than their gut feelings, because gut feelings are really hard to defend." - Dr. Matt Wilkinson [31:22 → 32:03]

"Why would you spend five, six, seven figures on customer insight when all you're going to do is turn it into a report, share it, have a couple of meetings about it and then forget it?" - Dr. Matt Wilkinson [44:05 → 44:24]

"People spend hundreds of dollars on buying a Montblanc pen. It performs the same service as a Bic Biro that maybe costs a dollar... The difference is how it makes you feel and how other people might perceive you using it." - Dr. Matt Wilkinson [47:39 → 49:27]

Resources and Links

Dr. Matt Wilkinson

• Strivenn
• drmattwilkinson.ai
• LinkedIn
• The Buyer in the Loop: How Synthetic Customers Stop Your Buyer Disappearing Between Research and Market

Mentioned in this episode

• You're the Top of the AI Sandwich - with Brian Piper and Matt Wilkinson
• Jim MacLeod, designer of the book cover

Timestamps

[00:00] Why many hands make flat work in comms and marketing

[02:54] Matt returns to the show

[04:24] The fireworks lecture that doubled undergraduate chemistry recruitment

[06:05] When anyone can create, understanding the customer is the edge

[07:18] Research-backed messaging that falls flat in the market

[09:13] Organizational gravity as a force of nature, not a department problem

[10:20] Naming the problem, and why good strategy stalls inside the organization

[10:58] Building synthetic customers from everything you know about your buyers

[12:20] Carrying the customer from inception to launch, and weighing legal's edits

[13:20] The heritage line: what customers actually want to hear about longevity

[17:27] Why "act as" prompts fall short

[18:56] The persona spectrum, from one-page profiles to grounded synthetic customers

[20:35] The persona workshop flip charts nobody ever sees again

[22:24] Using AI to build customer archetypes from data

[25:46] Backing up messaging decisions with 30 qualitative interviews

[28:34] What "grounded" means, and why it's a moat

[32:30] Testing the book cover on a synthetic panel and on LinkedIn

[39:48] Organizational gravity as Steven Pressfield's resistance

[40:49] Grounding as onboarding for AI models

[43:13] Zero-click search and the shrinking half-life of customer research

[46:15] Where synthetic customers break: temporal drift and knowledge gaps

[47:39] Why synthetic customers struggle with pricing

[52:28] Can synthetic personas model emotion? New Coke and asking the wrong questions

[57:02] Where communicators start: investors, stakeholders, and lobby groups as personas

[59:00] Wrap-up

About The Trending Communicator

The Trending Communicator is a podcast about the future of communications and marketing, hosted by Dan Nestle. Each episode is a conversation with a communicator, marketer, author, or technologist about how the work is changing and what that means for the people doing it. The show launched in 2020 as The Dan Nestle Show and has published more than 150 episodes.

About the Host

Dan Nestle (Daniel Nestle) is a communications strategist with more than 25 years of experience, including 16 years in Japan. He is co-founder and Chief Product & Intelligence Officer of Lilypath, the company behind the patent-pending Authority Intelligence™ platform, and founder and Chief Curiosity Officer of Inquisitive Communications, a strategic advisory practice. He received the 2022 Arthur W. Page Society Page Up Innovation Award, was named a PRWeek Dashboard 25 AI Pioneer in 2023 and 2024, and was named one of Propel's 100 Most Influential PR Tech Leaders Worldwide in 2025.

Connect with Dan

The Trending Communicator: https://trendingcommunicator.com
Substack: https://trendingcommunicator.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nestle
Lilypath: https://lilypath.com
Inquisitive Communications: https://be-inquisitive.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/trendingcommunicator

Show notes for The Trending Communicator are co-created by Human Dan, Claude, and Fireflies.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Try this at your next industry conference: ask a communicator when they last looked at a piece of work and said "that was good," and stopped there. No "but."

Chances are you'll get a blank stare, because we spend our careers making CEOs, brands, and clients look great, and somewhere along the way we started grading ourselves on the same curve: great work, great campaigns, the trophy wall. And now that AI has turned "do more with less" into "do everything by end of day," nobody seems to have paused to ask what "more" actually means, or who decided that good wasn't enough.

In this episode of The Trending Communicator, Dan Nestle talks with Heather A. Campbell, author of Good Is Amazing: Stop Over-Striving and Celebrate Being Enough and CEO and co-founder of Ready Set Recover. Heather's argument is simple and, for a room full of overachievers, a little uncomfortable: we've maligned the word good, we treat it as code for "do better," and the main character of your life (that's you) gets to decide what good is.

The conversation ranges from the grandfather at Harley-Davidson who taught Heather how to move an audience without a title, to the phone call from her mom that ended with a request to become President of the United States, to the McKinsey interview she turned down before it happened. Along the way, Dan and Heather land on why AI-written prose so often reads as "asshole adjacent" (her developmental editor's phrase, and a keeper), why "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" is something we say and never do, and what it means to name your inner critic (hers is called Blanche).

Listen in and hear about...

Notable Quotes

"The problem with the question though is it sounds like judgment and it doesn't sound like a question. It sounds like, prove to me that you are actually going to be able to be successful." - Heather Campbell [11:33 → 12:19]

"We've maligned the word good. We think of good as bad." - Heather Campbell [30:16 → 30:32]

"What if no one else was looking, if no one else was ever going to ask about it, praise you, or if no one else cared? Do you still care about it? Because if not, maybe it's not your thing." - Heather Campbell [32:39 → 32:54]

"In some ways, it doesn't matter if you've reached good or if you've reached amazing. If you're not happy with it, if you're not comfortable with it, if you always think there's more, it doesn't matter." - Heather Campbell [42:51 → 43:27]

"AI is a tool. It's a tool. But you don't have to just relinquish your ability. You're good communicators, people. You guys do this for a living. People pay you money to do this." - Heather Campbell [01:02:23 → 01:03:24]

Resources and Links

Dan Nestle

Heather A. Campbell

Timestamps

[00:15] The cost of "great" and perfectionism in communications

[02:00] Heather's background at ESPN building the Synergy team

[08:29] Heather's epiphany: choosing happiness over greatness

[11:02] The loaded question young graduates face

[17:20] Non-linear career path and following values

[18:36] Husband quits job to pursue entrepreneurship

[24:01] Going to NYU business school and the pottery essay

[27:17] Taking classes based on interest, not grades

[28:01] Getting rejected letter from NYU, switching to management major

[30:15] Redefining what "good" actually means

[36:58] Turning down McKinsey offer

[42:25] Confidence and self-awareness as keys to accepting "good enough"

[50:07] Naming your inner critic (Blanche)

[53:28] Direct response ad example: white space strategy

[56:50] AI-generated content sounds "asshole adjacent"

[01:00:08] AI as a tool, not a replacement for judgment

[01:02:24] Final advice: Own your narrative, define your own "good"

[01:03:56] Three things that make you happy framework

[01:07:17] Book and resources information

(Notes co-created by Human Dan, Claude, and Fireflies)

About The Trending Communicator

The Trending Communicator is a podcast about the future of communications and marketing, hosted by Dan Nestle. Each episode is a conversation with a communicator, marketer, author, or technologist about how the work is changing and what that means for the people doing it. The show launched in 2020 as The Dan Nestle Show and has published more than 150 episodes.

About the Host

Dan Nestle (Daniel Nestle) is a communications strategist with more than 25 years of experience, including 16 years in Japan. He is co-founder and Chief Product & Intelligence Officer of Lilypath, the company behind the patent-pending Authority Intelligence™ platform, and founder and Chief Curiosity Officer of Inquisitive Communications, a strategic advisory practice. He received the 2022 Arthur W. Page Society Page Up Innovation Award, was named a PRWeek Dashboard 25 AI Pioneer in 2023 and 2024, and was named one of Propel's 100 Most Influential PR Tech Leaders Worldwide in 2025.

Connect with Dan

The Trending Communicator: https://trendingcommunicator.com
Substack: https://trendingcommunicator.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nestle
Lilypath: https://lilypath.com
Inquisitive Communications: https://be-inquisitive.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/trendingcommunicator

Show notes for The Trending Communicator are co-created by Human Dan, Claude, and Fireflies.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Who handles generative engine optimization for you? Not for your company - for you. A brand has an answer to that question: a team, a vendor, a budget line, a dashboard somebody checks on Mondays. A person usually has nobody at all, and the tools that do exist were built to read websites, which turns out to be a thin substitute for a career.

In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with his own business partner, Erin Lanuti, co-founder and CEO of Lilypath and former Chief Innovation Officer at Omnicom Public Relations Group. Erin spent two decades building the measurement and AI search machinery that tells systems how to read brands, and kept running into the same asymmetry: companies have infrastructure to govern how they get interpreted, and individuals have nothing close to it. Authority Intelligence(TM) is the discipline she, Dan, and Todd Grossman built for the second problem.

The conversation moves from measuring earned media without a pixel to why she started digging into generative engine optimization roughly nine months before the industry had a name for it. What follows is Erin's case for why the individual version of that problem needs its own tools, and why the damage stays invisible to the person it's happening to. It ends on the question Erin says she hears from clients more than any other right now, which is whether they need their agency at all.

Listen in and hear about:

Notable Quotes from Erin

"I keep saying measurement needs an intervention. It does, because we have better tech than we've ever had. And the consumer journey has changed. And we have to ask ourselves why. Why are we measuring that? What's the importance of that metric? Is that still true today?"

"Help me understand how, in a world where advertising budgets are getting cut to these publications and we're losing tons of earned media outlets every day, in this new world of GEO, when earned is more important than ever, if they're all shutting down, how are we going to get those earned citations?"

"As we look at some of the most respected people in the world that we've been doing some analyses on, these people should be perfect in the AI system. And they're far from perfect."

"There are people that have way less authority but know how to game the system. They know that if they assemble a clear picture around a topic, clear, concise, consistent, that their authority in the eyes of a machine can be perceived higher than people who without question have higher status or stature."

Resources and Links

Dan Nestle

Erin Lanuti

Timestamps

[00:00] Introduction and Host Principles

[00:35] Meeting Erin Lanuti - Business Partner Introduction

[06:10] Erin's Career Origin Story - Burson and Colgate

[07:43] Bell South Olympic Sponsorship and Early Success

[08:07] Move to MSL and P&G's New to the World Initiative

[08:50] Pioneering Entertainment Marketing with Jessica Simpson and Swiffer

[11:12] Transition to Agency Leadership and UL (Underwriters Laboratory)

[12:51] Creating Innovative Campaigns - White House Christmas Tree and Muppets

[13:30] Developing Conversation to Commerce Technology

[17:21] The Problem with Traditional PR Metrics (Impressions and AVE)

[19:40] Omni Earned ID - Moving Beyond Vanity Metrics

[23:24] Understanding AI Search and Reputational Risk

[28:40] Erin's Non-Linear Career Path and Early AI Research

[30:04] The Tide Pod Problem - AI Generating Dangerous Information

[33:39] Building Integrated Marketing Solutions for AI Era

[38:34] Citations Over Traditional Top-Tier Outlets

[43:04] Introducing Authority Graph for Personal Authority Management

[49:45] Personal Branding Reset in the AI Era

[54:48] The Threat - Lower-Authority People Gaming the System

[58:21] Individual vs. Brand Reputation Management

[01:03:30] Agency Value Proposition Crisis and Repositioning Opportunity

[01:08:46] Closing Remarks and Where to Find Erin

About The Trending Communicator

The Trending Communicator is a podcast about the future of communications and marketing, hosted by Dan Nestle. Each episode is a conversation with a communicator, marketer, author, or technologist about how the work is changing and what that means for the people doing it. The show launched in 2020 as The Dan Nestle Show and has published more than 150 episodes.

About the Host

Dan Nestle (Daniel Nestle) is a communications strategist with more than 25 years of experience, including 16 years in Japan. He is co-founder and Chief Product & Intelligence Officer of Lilypath, the company behind the patent-pending Authority Intelligence™ platform, and founder and Chief Curiosity Officer of Inquisitive Communications, a strategic advisory practice. He received the 2022 Arthur W. Page Society Page Up Innovation Award, was named a PRWeek Dashboard 25 AI Pioneer in 2023 and 2024, and was named one of Propel's 100 Most Influential PR Tech Leaders Worldwide in 2025.

Connect with Dan

The Trending Communicator: https://trendingcommunicator.com
Substack: https://trendingcommunicator.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nestle
Lilypath: https://lilypath.com
Inquisitive Communications: https://be-inquisitive.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/trendingcommunicator

Show notes for The Trending Communicator are co-created by Human Dan, Claude, and Fireflies.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Somewhere along the way, PR research came to mean a survey reverse-engineered to confirm whatever the client had already decided to say. Real research, the slow and expensive kind, stayed with the academics, because nobody on the agency or client side had the hours. So what happens when the cost of doing it right collapses?

In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with Rich Gallagher, Head of Comms Innovation at Brands2Life, whose answer to that question was to write the code himself. Each of his research reports started as something close to a dare — watch a month of business television, read every business-section story in three national papers, listen to a year of back catalog across 96 podcasts — and each came back with a number worth having, like the 12% of those shows actually built for the privately held companies his clients run.

That method is the easy part to admire and the wrong part to copy, and the conversation goes well past it. Rich and Dan get into why curiosity has always been the one non-negotiable trait in a good PR person, and why for the first time there's something like a metric for it. They work through The Rise of Indie Journalism, Rich's study of 32 tech journalists who walked away from traditional mastheads and took their audiences with them. They dig into why generative engine optimization is quietly making niche trade coverage more valuable than a one-line mention in a marquee outlet, and what media relations turns into when it stops being a tier-one scavenger hunt. Rich also shares the app his team built to score World Cup managers on how hard they lean on clichés, and the uncomfortable pattern it surfaced about losing coaches.

Listen in and hear about...

Notable Quotes from Rich Gallagher

"You watch every single hour of market-day television on the three major business broadcast networks for a month? Like, no, of course not. That's like a Geneva Convention violation to force someone to do that. But now we have tools. You can scrape the closed caption for the hearing impaired and effectively make the AI watch the show." [07:16 → 08:01]

"The challenge is you can't read everything all the time. But what if you could? And now that you have AI, you can. We can analyze all these things at a scale that doesn't exist even inside a very big agency, where you can not only make sure you're reading every single business section story that runs that quarter, but reading it with the same eyes." [33:06 → 33:47]

"The most important thing for a successful PR person is curiosity. Really being genuinely interested in uncovering what's special about what your clients do. And it's kind of funny, because there's never really been a good metric for curiosity, and now we have it." [40:38 → 41:26]

"I don't necessarily subscribe to 'media relations is dead.' But it kind of goes into a chrysalis and emerges as a beautiful butterfly every couple of years." [52:46 → 53:27]

Resources and Links

Dan Nestle

Rich Gallagher

The Brands2Life Research Reports

Timestamps

0:00 Intro: real research and its counterfeit cousin

2:33 Two nerds, two girl dads, one Princeton zip code

4:16 The ADP employment report and data a company already had

5:33 Moat, ad spend, and the run-up to 2016

7:16 "Make the AI watch the show" — Breaking Through in Broadcast

10:51 Predictive analytics the hard way: 150 hours, then 30 seconds

13:04 Why the AI policy came before the research

15:16 Three newspapers, three paywalls, three automations

15:57 Testing whether the AI actually read it

17:28 Podcast transcripts and the wild west of captions

19:56 Claude Code, Cowork, and what changed

22:53 Thirty sub-agents that never lose their place

26:06 Where deep research helps and where it stops

29:09 The Tech Podcast Opportunity: 96 shows and the 12% that mattered

31:32 Where the questions come from in the first place

38:13 The human-in-the-loop sandwich

40:38 Curiosity as the differentiator — and finally a metric

43:19 The Rise of Indie Journalism: Substack, Ghost, and Beehiiv

46:20 Velvet Underground economics and portable audiences

49:00 Media relations, dying or molting

55:27 Why GEO makes vertical media solid gold

59:17 Authority when the entity is a person, not a website

1:01:46 The cliché tracker, hot IPO summer, and what's next

1:05:04 Where to find Rich

(Notes co-created by Human Dan, Claude, Fireflies, and Riverside)

About The Trending Communicator

The Trending Communicator is a podcast about the future of communications and marketing, hosted by Dan Nestle. Each episode is a conversation with a communicator, marketer, author, or technologist about how the work is changing and what that means for the people doing it. The show launched in 2020 as The Dan Nestle Show and has published more than 150 episodes.

About the Host

Dan Nestle (Daniel Nestle) is a communications strategist with more than 25 years of experience, including 16 years in Japan. He is co-founder and Chief Product & Intelligence Officer of Lilypath, the company behind the patent-pending Authority Intelligence™ platform, and founder and Chief Curiosity Officer of Inquisitive Communications, a strategic advisory practice. He received the 2022 Arthur W. Page Society Page Up Innovation Award, was named a PRWeek Dashboard 25 AI Pioneer in 2023 and 2024, and was named one of Propel's 100 Most Influential PR Tech Leaders Worldwide in 2025.

Connect with Dan

The Trending Communicator: https://trendingcommunicator.com
Substack: https://trendingcommunicator.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nestle
Lilypath: https://lilypath.com
Inquisitive Communications: https://be-inquisitive.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/trendingcommunicator

Show notes for The Trending Communicator are co-created by Human Dan, Claude, and Fireflies.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Can you build word of mouth on purpose?

Few people are better equipped to answer it than Sarah Neely. She's spent two decades engineering the conversations most brands just hope will happen by accident, and she's now the founder of SignalSwell, built to make human word of mouth "audible" to AI. She also leads client strategy at Fizz, one of the few agencies built entirely around getting people to talk. Her premise runs against everything a virality-obsessed business wants to believe: advocates are a personality type you can plan for, and the right story dropped in the right place does the rest.

In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle and Sarah dig into what "story" actually means at the level of a single human conversation, the shorthand one person uses to describe you to someone else. They get into why a cactus at a wedding travels further than a logo, how Red Bull carries the same story from an F1 helmet to a truck stop, and the SHARE framework Sarah uses to build experiences worth repeating.

Then the conversation turns to AI. If the machines increasingly decide which conversations get surfaced, communicators have to make human word of mouth visible to them, on the channels that actually feed the models. It's a practical problem with a strange philosophical center. Maybe human conversation isn't competing with AI at all. Maybe it's the operating system AI runs on.

Listen in and hear about...

Notable Quotes from Sarah Neely

"The story is that sort of shorthand way that one person would describe a product, a brand, an experience to another person." - Sarah Neely

"If you take all the colors that are in your paint kit, you're going to make something that's brown or gray. It has nothing interesting to look at. And that's what chat is doing." - Sarah Neely

"You need to create signals for humans and AI, and then you need to swell that footprint through human conversation at scale." - Sarah Neely

"The purpose is to remind me to ask more questions, remind me to explore on my own, and remind me to bring it up in a human conversation if it feels relevant." - Sarah Neely

Resources and Links

Dan Nestle

Sarah Neely

Timestamps

[00:00 - 03:00] Introduction to Word of Mouth Marketing

[03:00 - 09:32] Community and AI Curiosity

[09:32 - 15:58] Word of Mouth as Wedding Planning

[15:58 - 19:49] Defining the Story in Word of Mouth

[19:49 - 24:30] Value Proposition vs Conversational Story

[24:30 - 28:35] SHARE Framework for Story Moments

[28:35 - 30:07] Marketing and PR Collaboration

[30:07 - 35:15] Red Bull Case Study

[35:15 - 43:20] AI Visibility of Human Conversations

[43:20 - 50:22] Social Media vs Word of Mouth Marketing

[50:22 - 53:44] Key Channels for AI Discovery

[53:44 - 56:46] Owned Content Importance

[56:46 - 01:02:24] Human Conversation as AI Foundation

[01:02:24 - 01:04:07] Introduction to Signal Swell

[01:04:07 - 01:10:58] Holistic Approach: The Five C's

[01:10:58 - 01:13:04] Closing Recommendations

(Notes co-created by Human Dan, Claude, Fireflies, and Riverside)

About The Trending Communicator

The Trending Communicator is a podcast about the future of communications and marketing, hosted by Dan Nestle. Each episode is a conversation with a communicator, marketer, author, or technologist about how the work is changing and what that means for the people doing it. The show launched in 2020 as The Dan Nestle Show and has published more than 150 episodes.

About the Host

Dan Nestle (Daniel Nestle) is a communications strategist with more than 25 years of experience, including 16 years in Japan. He is co-founder and Chief Product & Intelligence Officer of Lilypath, the company behind the patent-pending Authority Intelligence™ platform, and founder and Chief Curiosity Officer of Inquisitive Communications, a strategic advisory practice. He received the 2022 Arthur W. Page Society Page Up Innovation Award, was named a PRWeek Dashboard 25 AI Pioneer in 2023 and 2024, and was named one of Propel's 100 Most Influential PR Tech Leaders Worldwide in 2025.

Connect with Dan

The Trending Communicator: https://trendingcommunicator.com
Substack: https://trendingcommunicator.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nestle
Lilypath: https://lilypath.com
Inquisitive Communications: https://be-inquisitive.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/trendingcommunicator

Show notes for The Trending Communicator are co-created by Human Dan, Claude, and Fireflies.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If AI writes a better prompt than you can now, what are you still being paid for?

In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle is joined by two of his closest collaborators, Brian Piper, content and AI integration consultant and co-author of Epic Content Marketing Volume 2, and Dr. Matt Wilkinson, founder of UK agency Strivenn and author of the forthcoming Buyer in the Loop. A month earlier, the three shared a stage at Mark Schaefer's Uprising retreat, building one marketing plan together, each orchestrating their own team of AI helpers to pull it off.

Their answer to the question above is discernment. The AI handles the prompting now and most of the drafting. What it can't do is know when an output is wrong, when a claim is weak, when "good enough" isn't. That judgment comes from years of doing the work, and it's the one thing you bring to the machine that the machine can't supply for itself.

The same idea runs through everything else they get into: why enterprise AI rollouts keep stalling, why "saving time" never seems to free anyone up, and why the white-collar-apocalypse story makes better clickbait than it does prediction.

Listen in and hear about...

Notable Quotes from Brian Piper and Matt Wilkinson

"I think where it really excels is when you tie in expertise, you know, and you talked about building that discernment into the prompt and into the structure of your models that you're using." - Brian Piper

"We have this extra time that AI has given us. Now the really strategic part is figuring out how you're going to use that time and how you're going to spend that time in a way that benefits your organization the most or benefits your customer the most." - Brian Piper

"Otherwise the world is just going to be full of AI slop. But we can really use AI to increase the way that we think, the way that we engage with the information that we have." - Matt Wilkinson

"There is no incentive to work with the AI to teach the AI to take over the tasks that you're doing, because then the AI can take your job. So why are you training up your replacement?" - Matt Wilkinson

"I felt lonelier working at an organization than I did now that I'm on my own." - Brian Piper

Resources and Links

Dan Nestle

Matt Wilkinson

Brian Piper

Timestamps

00:00 Navigating Job Loss and New Beginnings

03:01 The Power of Collaboration in Solopreneurship

05:40 The Unique Experience of the Uprising Retreat

11:48 AI Beyond the Prompt: A New Approach

20:34 The Importance of Mindset and Discernment in AI

30:22 Operationalizing Expertise and Discernment

38:46 Merging Human Insight with AI

40:40 The Compounding Effect of Collaboration

42:09 Understanding AI Governance and Implementation

44:45 Strategic Use of AI Time Savings

46:49 The Myth of Time Freedom with AI

48:43 The Disconnect in AI Adoption

49:07 Building a Community for AI Success

50:05 The Importance of Change Management

52:33 The Reality of AI's Impact on Jobs

54:02 Navigating Job Evolution in the AI Era

56:26 Responsible AI Integration

58:16 The Role of Education in AI Adaptation

01:01:12 The Future of Job Markets and Education

01:04:19 Teaching Prompting for AI

01:07:32 Creating a New Educational Framework

01:10:00 The Solopreneur Experience

01:12:20 The Loneliness Myth in Entrepreneurship

01:15:20 The Human Element in AI Conversations

About The Trending Communicator

The Trending Communicator is a podcast about the future of communications and marketing, hosted by Dan Nestle. Each episode is a conversation with a communicator, marketer, author, or technologist about how the work is changing and what that means for the people doing it. The show launched in 2020 as The Dan Nestle Show and has published more than 150 episodes.

About the Host

Dan Nestle (Daniel Nestle) is a communications strategist with more than 25 years of experience, including 16 years in Japan. He is co-founder and Chief Product & Intelligence Officer of Lilypath, the company behind the patent-pending Authority Intelligence™ platform, and founder and Chief Curiosity Officer of Inquisitive Communications, a strategic advisory practice. He received the 2022 Arthur W. Page Society Page Up Innovation Award, was named a PRWeek Dashboard 25 AI Pioneer in 2023 and 2024, and was named one of Propel's 100 Most Influential PR Tech Leaders Worldwide in 2025.

Connect with Dan

The Trending Communicator: https://trendingcommunicator.com
Substack: https://trendingcommunicator.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nestle
Lilypath: https://lilypath.com
Inquisitive Communications: https://be-inquisitive.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/trendingcommunicator

Show notes for The Trending Communicator are co-created by Human Dan, Claude, and Fireflies.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Plenty of companies have bolted AI onto how they already work and called it transformation. Far fewer have rebuilt the business around it.

In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle talks with Brian McHale, CEO and owner of Brandience, who bought a struggling traditional ad agency back in 2008 and spent the better part of two decades quietly rebuilding it around AI. His shop now runs eight AI agents for every human employee, cut prospect research from 45 minutes to under 10, and was among the first agencies in the country to earn AI ethics certification. And he did all of it from Cincinnati, not Silicon Valley—which might be exactly why it works.

This isn't a story about swapping people for machines. Brian's approach is AI Forward, not AI First: humans stay at the center, and AI makes them better at what they already do. He and Dan get into the unglamorous reality of transformation that actually works—why ambiguity is the biggest source of AI mistakes, how guardrails free people to experiment rather than fence them in, why a leader's job has moved upstream in the content process, and what it means to know when to call a timeout. As Brian puts it, judgment only comes with experience.

They also dig into agents and playbooks (and why a playbook is really just a workflow with an agent for each step), the internal bonus program that tied every employee to an AI project and delivered the best ROI Brandience has seen on anything, and the client conversations nobody saw coming—not "please use more AI," but "can I actually own this?"

It's a grounded, refreshingly hype-free look at what rebuilding a business around AI looks like from the inside.

Listen in and hear about...

Notable Quotes from Brian McHale

On keeping humans central: "Humans are at the center of everything we're doing still."

"The first word that comes to mind for me is just transparency. Because using AI or not using AI either way is just fine."

"If you don't know when to say when or when to call a timeout, which frankly really only comes with experience, then you're kind of crossing your fingers and hoping that the tool does what you want it to do."

"My goal in life is not to have Brandiance be me sitting there with 50 agents. That sounds terrible."

Resources and Links

Dan Nestle

Brian McHale

Timestamps

0:00:00 Host's skepticism on "transformation" and intro to Brian McHale
0:06:00 Brandiance's transformation: AI-forward, industry focus, balancing tech and people
0:12:00 Navigating regulations, ethics, and AI adoption in healthcare and marketing
0:18:00 Ethics in AI: transparency, authenticity, and employee guardrails
0:24:00 Leadership responsibility: upstream involvement and AI policy guardrails
0:30:00 AI operator training, evolving skills, and workplace adoption challenges
0:36:00 Playbooks and agents: Brandiance's approach to AI workflows
0:42:00 Agentic tools, Claude Cowork, and collaborative design system workflows
0:48:00 Client expectations, ownership, and business implications of AI in agency work
0:54:00 Governance challenges, AI engagement incentives, and employee-driven innovation
1:00:00 Staffing, layoffs, overreaction to AI, and the value of experience in the AI era
1:06:00 Closing remarks, where to find Brian McHale, show wrap-up

(Notes co-created by Human Dan, Claude, and Castmagic)

About The Trending Communicator

The Trending Communicator is a podcast about the future of communications and marketing, hosted by Dan Nestle. Each episode is a conversation with a communicator, marketer, author, or technologist about how the work is changing and what that means for the people doing it. The show launched in 2020 as The Dan Nestle Show and has published more than 150 episodes.

About the Host

Dan Nestle (Daniel Nestle) is a communications strategist with more than 25 years of experience, including 16 years in Japan. He is co-founder and Chief Product & Intelligence Officer of Lilypath, the company behind the patent-pending Authority Intelligence™ platform, and founder and Chief Curiosity Officer of Inquisitive Communications, a strategic advisory practice. He received the 2022 Arthur W. Page Society Page Up Innovation Award, was named a PRWeek Dashboard 25 AI Pioneer in 2023 and 2024, and was named one of Propel's 100 Most Influential PR Tech Leaders Worldwide in 2025.

Connect with Dan

The Trending Communicator: https://trendingcommunicator.com
Substack: https://trendingcommunicator.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nestle
Lilypath: https://lilypath.com
Inquisitive Communications: https://be-inquisitive.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/trendingcommunicator

Show notes for The Trending Communicator are co-created by Human Dan, Claude, and Fireflies.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Authenticity might be the most abused word in business today. Every AI tool promises to preserve it. Every leadership guru sells it as a brand pillar. And the more it gets thrown around, the less it actually means.

In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with Allison Shapira — founder and CEO of Global Public Speaking, Harvard Kennedy School lecturer, regular HBR contributor, and author of AI for the Authentic Leader: How to Communicate More Effectively Without Losing Your Humanity. Allison went from the opera stage to the corridors of diplomacy, eventually building a global communication training company that now coaches prime ministers, cabinet members, and Fortune 100 executives in their highest-stakes moments.

Allison and Dan dig into what authenticity actually means when AI can draft your speech in seconds, why generic AI output is quietly eroding trust between leaders and the teams they lead, and how the AI Authenticity Loop gives communicators a practical way to use these tools without flattening their voice. Along the way, they explore why live speaking might be the last place left to be certain a human is being human — and why the choices we make about AI in the next three years will determine whether it brings us together or pulls us apart.

Listen in and hear about...

Notable Quotes from Allison Shapira

"This is not about keeping the human in the loop. As I say in my book, the human IS the loop."

"It would be rude to ask a human for feedback when you haven't asked an AI first because it would be a waste of the human's time."

"The decisions we make in the next three years will determine where AI goes. Whether it brings us together, builds trust, whether it pushes us apart and isolates us even further."

Resources and Links

Dan Nestle

Allison Shapira

Timestamps

0:00:00 Introduction: Authenticity, leadership, and guest Allison Shapira
0:06:18 Allison Shapira’s journey: From opera to diplomacy and communication
0:12:29 Defining effective leadership communication and the ACE model
0:18:20 AI's impact on human connection and the risks to authentic communication
0:24:01 Strategic authenticity: Aligning personal and organizational values
0:31:07 How AI undermines trust when misused in corporate messaging
0:37:21 Human vs. AI knowledge: Authenticity and lived experience
0:43:50 Dangers of outsourcing critical thinking to AI and accountability
0:50:01 The AI Authenticity Loop: Five-step framework explained
0:57:25 Importance of feedback and critical engagement with AI tools
1:01:49 Final thoughts: Shaping the future of AI, authenticity, and leadership

About The Trending Communicator

The Trending Communicator is a podcast about the future of communications and marketing, hosted by Dan Nestle. Each episode is a conversation with a communicator, marketer, author, or technologist about how the work is changing and what that means for the people doing it. The show launched in 2020 as The Dan Nestle Show and has published more than 150 episodes.

About the Host

Dan Nestle (Daniel Nestle) is a communications strategist with more than 25 years of experience, including 16 years in Japan. He is co-founder and Chief Product & Intelligence Officer of Lilypath, the company behind the patent-pending Authority Intelligence™ platform, and founder and Chief Curiosity Officer of Inquisitive Communications, a strategic advisory practice. He received the 2022 Arthur W. Page Society Page Up Innovation Award, was named a PRWeek Dashboard 25 AI Pioneer in 2023 and 2024, and was named one of Propel's 100 Most Influential PR Tech Leaders Worldwide in 2025.

Connect with Dan

The Trending Communicator: https://trendingcommunicator.com
Substack: https://trendingcommunicator.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nestle
Lilypath: https://lilypath.com
Inquisitive Communications: https://be-inquisitive.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/trendingcommunicator

Show notes for The Trending Communicator are co-created by Human Dan, Claude, and Fireflies.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Companies are racing to stuff AI into everything. They're also throwing away the only thing that would make their AI actually useful. Decades of institutional memory, hard-won lessons, the stories baked into the bones of the organization, all left in a box labeled "archive" and forgotten. Then everyone wonders why the LLM keeps hallucinating.

In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with Jason Dressel, CEO of History Factory and host of the History Factory Podcast. Jason came up inside one company, learned the craft from its founder, and eventually succeeded him. He's spent the better part of three decades helping the world's most enduring enterprises turn their history into a competitive asset, and just launched Chroniqle, a first-of-its-kind AI platform built to make institutional memory live, citable, and useful for the AI era.

Jason and Dan dig into why "garbage in, garbage out" is the real ceiling for enterprise AI, why ripping out expertise and replacing it with machines is the most expensive mistake leaders are making right now, and why the companies that win the next decade will be the ones that stay tethered to who they are — even as everything else changes.

Listen in and hear about...

Notable Quotes

"The more intelligent and data rich we get, the more illiterate we become. We are about to go through a hyper scaled phase of sameness and commoditization at scale." - Jason Dressel

"The organizations that think they're going to dramatically remove expertise and institutional knowledge and replace it with machines, I think it's going to be incredibly short sighted." - Jason Dressel

"If you replace the word history with experience, it's interpreted in a completely different context. Organizations that are able to continue to access their memory, their experience, are going to wield it to differentiate." - Jason Dressel

Resources and Links

Dan Nestle

Jason Dressel

Timestamps

0:00:00 Introduction: Forgetting Institutional Memory in the AI Rush
0:06:00 History Factory’s “Start with the Future and Work Back” Philosophy
0:12:00 Sifting Historical Archives: Golden Nuggets & Strategic Relevance
0:18:00 What Triggers Companies to Act on Institutional Memory
0:24:00 When Organizational History Challenges Brand Identity
0:30:00 Change Management, Employee Identity, and Brand Transformation
0:36:00 From Analog to Digital: Evolution of Corporate Archives
0:42:00 The Need for Clean, Contextual Data in AI & Introduction to Chronicle
0:48:00 Chronicle Use Cases: From Social Content to Strategic Planning
0:54:00 The Future of Institutional Memory: Avoiding Sameness & Staying Tethered
1:00:00 Does Deep History Give Organizations a Competitive Advantage?
1:06:00 Individual vs. Company Expertise: Domain, Experience, and Wisdom

(Notes co-created by Human Dan, Claude, and Castmagic)

About The Trending Communicator

The Trending Communicator is a podcast about the future of communications and marketing, hosted by Dan Nestle. Each episode is a conversation with a communicator, marketer, author, or technologist about how the work is changing and what that means for the people doing it. The show launched in 2020 as The Dan Nestle Show and has published more than 150 episodes.

About the Host

Dan Nestle (Daniel Nestle) is a communications strategist with more than 25 years of experience, including 16 years in Japan. He is co-founder and Chief Product & Intelligence Officer of Lilypath, the company behind the patent-pending Authority Intelligence™ platform, and founder and Chief Curiosity Officer of Inquisitive Communications, a strategic advisory practice. He received the 2022 Arthur W. Page Society Page Up Innovation Award, was named a PRWeek Dashboard 25 AI Pioneer in 2023 and 2024, and was named one of Propel's 100 Most Influential PR Tech Leaders Worldwide in 2025.

Connect with Dan

The Trending Communicator: https://trendingcommunicator.com
Substack: https://trendingcommunicator.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nestle
Lilypath: https://lilypath.com
Inquisitive Communications: https://be-inquisitive.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/trendingcommunicator

Show notes for The Trending Communicator are co-created by Human Dan, Claude, and Fireflies.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The story you've been told about your aging brain is wrong. Strategic attention peaks in your late 50s. Innovative cognition in your early 60s. Integrative reasoning around 62. Meanwhile, AI keeps commoditizing the very capabilities younger workers were supposed to dominate — speed, information processing, rapid adaptation. The math has shifted. Human judgment, the thing the midlife brain actually does best, may be the last unfair advantage left.

In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle welcomes back Dr. Michael Netzley, founder and CEO of Extend My Runway, faculty at IMD and Korn Ferry, and author of the Substack Thrive After 45. Five years after their first conversation about neuroplasticity and the executive brain, Michael returns with new evidence, sharper tools, and a clearer argument — the cognitive abilities AI cannot replicate are exactly the ones that strengthen with age, if you make the investments.

Dan and Michael unpack why AI takes the execution but leaves the questions and the judgment, why transformational thinking may be the platinum cognitive skill of the AI era, and the stark choice between offloading your brain and sharpening it. They get into Janus, Mark Schaefer, brain health fundamentals, neurodiversity, and why the survivors of this moment will be the ones who stop competing with AI on its strongest ground.

Listen in and hear about...

Notable Quotes from Michael Netzley

"Your adult brain is your last unfair advantage in the age of AI. And if you optimize these midlife strengths by making investments, you can do the things that AI cannot."

"Transformational thinking is your platinum cognitive function. Because if you cannot do that sequence of zoom in, zoom out, zoom wide, you literally become irrelevant."

"AI is probably not going to make you dumber, but the choices you make definitely can."

Resources and Links

Dan Nestle

Dr. Michael Netzley

Timestamps

0:00:00 Introduction: Revisiting aging brain myths and the rise of AI

0:06:36 AI and midlife cognitive strengths: Thriving after 45

0:12:24 AI’s impact on communicators: Shifting value to judgment and creativity

0:18:51 AI prompts, creativity backlash, and evolving skillsets

0:25:36 Cognitive offload, adaptability, and career phase challenges in the AI era

0:32:17 Developing curiosity and transformational thinking at any age

0:39:33 Cognitive overload, judgment, and building personal content systems

0:46:40 Transformational thinking, portfolio careers, and identity shifts

0:53:06 Brain health foundations and practical brain training for higher-order skills

0:58:46 Neurodiversity, novelty, and finding fulfillment through varied roles

1:05:21 Senior roles, independence, and the evolving definition of success

1:09:01 The “year of the oops”: AI layoffs, organizational knowledge, and future-proofing careers

1:11:04 Closing remarks and resources

About The Trending Communicator

The Trending Communicator is a podcast about the future of communications and marketing, hosted by Dan Nestle. Each episode is a conversation with a communicator, marketer, author, or technologist about how the work is changing and what that means for the people doing it. The show launched in 2020 as The Dan Nestle Show and has published more than 150 episodes.

About the Host

Dan Nestle (Daniel Nestle) is a communications strategist with more than 25 years of experience, including 16 years in Japan. He is co-founder and Chief Product & Intelligence Officer of Lilypath, the company behind the patent-pending Authority Intelligence™ platform, and founder and Chief Curiosity Officer of Inquisitive Communications, a strategic advisory practice. He received the 2022 Arthur W. Page Society Page Up Innovation Award, was named a PRWeek Dashboard 25 AI Pioneer in 2023 and 2024, and was named one of Propel's 100 Most Influential PR Tech Leaders Worldwide in 2025.

Connect with Dan

The Trending Communicator: https://trendingcommunicator.com
Substack: https://trendingcommunicator.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nestle
Lilypath: https://lilypath.com
Inquisitive Communications: https://be-inquisitive.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/trendingcommunicator

Show notes for The Trending Communicator are co-created by Human Dan, Claude, and Fireflies.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.