As summer approaches, I have been receiving a flood of emails from college students looking for internships.
Many of them are impressive. The emails are polished, thoughtful and highly personalized. They reference my background, mention companies I have worked for and talk about Mindtrip’s products and mission in ways that clearly required research and preparation.
And yet, after reading many of them, they all start to feel the same.
Not because they are poorly written. In fact, most are exceptionally well written, more so than ever before. The challenge is that very few of them make you feel like the person behind the email actually knows the company in any meaningful way. They talk about how much they admire the product, but rarely share anything that suggests they have genuinely spent time using it. In many cases, they have not even created an account or experienced the product firsthand. They describe a passion for innovation, but do not point to a moment where something resonated with them personally, solved a problem for them or changed how they thought about travel.
The words felt personalized, but the experience did not.
The more I think about it, the more I believe that sentence captures exactly where we are with AI at work. As more people build AI into their daily workflows, communication is becoming increasingly optimized, automated and polished. What is often getting lost in the process is the part people actually remember: the feeling of human connection.
According to Gallup, 50% of U.S. employees now use AI at work in some capacity, marking the first time workplace AI adoption has crossed the halfway mark.
AI is no longer just helping people complete isolated tasks faster; it is becoming embedded into how work itself gets organized. Most workplace technologies take years to become mainstream. AI is becoming embedded in workflows almost as quickly as companies can figure out how to oversee it.
At this point, many of us are no longer simply using AI as a tool. We are building entire operating systems around it.
The Operating System Everyone Is Building
People are connecting their email, Slack, CRM systems, meeting transcripts and research repositories into increasingly sophisticated AI workflows. They are creating custom skills for brand voice, customer insights, presentation drafting and other repetitive parts of knowledge work. AI systems are now generating morning reports, summarizing meetings, surfacing competitive intelligence, organizing tasks and drafting communications before most people have had their first cup of coffee.
And honestly, a lot of it is incredibly useful.
I understand the appeal because I am building many of these systems myself. Every morning, I receive reports designed to tell me what I may have missed while I was sleeping, what I should be paying attention to and what I likely need to prioritize for the day ahead. Some summarize developments across AI, travel and technology. Others tell me what I need to review from my team, who I should probably follow up with, where competitive movements may require attention and what conversations or world events may come up throughout the day. I use AI to help prioritize work, synthesize research, gather insights, draft presentations and pressure test ideas.
This article itself benefited from AI, not because AI wrote it for me, but because AI helped me think through it. I used it to challenge assumptions, organize ideas, identify supporting research and refine the structure. Then came the much more important part: multiple rounds of editing, rewriting and back-and-forth discussions to make sure the perspective, tone and voice actually sounded like me.
The result is better because of the collaboration. But increasingly, I wonder whether we are putting that same level of care into how our communication actually makes other people feel.
That is the promise of AI as an operating system. It helps us process information faster, identify patterns more efficiently and remove friction from repetitive work. In many ways, these systems are becoming essential for keeping up with the pace of modern life and work.
The problem begins when efficiency becomes the goal rather than the enabler.
When Remembering Everything Misses the Point
Increasingly, people are taking AI-generated communication and sending it into the world with little thought for how it actually makes another person feel. Outreach has become optimized, follow-ups have become automated and relationships are starting to feel more transactional than personal. In the process, communication is beginning to lose some of its humanity.
The U.S. Surgeon General recently declared loneliness and social disconnection a public health epidemic, noting that nearly 50% of U.S. adults report experiencing loneliness, even as technology has made it easier than ever to stay connected.
I think that contradiction is showing up everywhere right now. We have more tools to communicate, remember and stay connected than ever before, yet many interactions increasingly feel transactional and emotionally flat.
I notice this most in conference follow-ups. AI can now summarize every conversation we have. It can tell us where we met, what company someone works for, what they are trying to accomplish and what topics were discussed. These AI-generated summaries catalogue everything we heard in hopes of making the other person feel heard and remembered.
Ironically, they often have the opposite effect.
When every detail is treated as equally important, the moments that actually create connection get lost in the noise.
What these systems still struggle to understand is which parts of those conversations actually mattered.
Very often, the most important moment has nothing to do with business at all. It is learning that someone is having a baby. It is the conversation at the hotel bar about menopause, aging parents or sending a child off to college. It is discovering that someone who appears incredibly successful professionally is quietly navigating burnout, uncertainty, or a major life transition.
Those moments are not distractions from relationship building. They are relationship building.
The longest-running study on human happiness found that the quality of our relationships is one of the strongest predictors of long-term happiness, health and overall wellbeing.
Maya Angelou is often credited with saying, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
In the age of AI, that quote takes on an entirely new meaning.
As more communication becomes AI-assisted, the emotional experience of an interaction becomes even more important because it is one of the few things that cannot be easily automated. People may not remember the perfectly optimized follow-up email. They may not remember the flawless meeting recap or the comprehensive sales outreach. They will remember whether they felt seen, whether they felt understood and whether they felt like there was an actual human being on the other side of the interaction.
The Job of Marketing Is Still to Make People Feel
That may be one of the most important lessons marketers can take from the AI era. As content becomes easier to generate, trust becomes harder to earn.
At a recent travel and tourism event I attended, I found myself having multiple conversations about what this means for marketers, especially in travel.
As AI becomes increasingly involved in how trips are discovered and planned, the role of destinations shifts from simply providing information to creating emotional connection. Destinations cannot simply focus on delivering more information. They also have to become better at helping travelers feel something.
That does not come from simply answering questions about attractions or local hotels. It comes from helping someone imagine what it feels like to be there. What does it feel like to walk into a neighborhood coffee shop where the owner knows everyone by name? What does it feel like to spend an afternoon talking to locals at a winery, sitting around a firepit in Montana, hearing live music spill out onto the streets in Nashville or experiencing the warmth and energy of Puerto Rico?
Research from Sprout Social found that 64% of consumers want brands to connect with them, reinforcing how important authenticity, relatability and emotional connection have become.
That is where destinations themselves provide extraordinary value. Destinations understand the emotional identity of a place better than any algorithm ever will. They understand the personality of neighborhoods, the rhythm of a community, the stories locals tell, the hidden moments visitors remember and the emotional reasons people fall in love with a place in the first place.
Trip-planning technology should not replace that. It should amplify it.
The role of AI and trip-planning platforms is to help turn emotional connection into action. They help travelers move from inspiration to decisions. They turn “I want to feel that” into an itinerary, a recommendation, a reservation or an experience. Technology can help remove friction, personalize choices and accelerate decision making, but the emotional connection still starts with the destination itself.
Ironically, I think the rise of AI makes this even more important.
As AI-generated content becomes more abundant, emotionally generic content becomes easier to recognize.
Consumers can feel the difference between marketing designed to rank and marketing designed to connect. They can feel the difference between a destination that understands its emotional identity and one that is simply producing endless content optimized for algorithms.
AI Can Help Us Remember, But It Cannot Help Us Care
The same thing is happening in business communication. AI can help us write faster, but faster is not always better. The challenge is that communication is no longer judged simply by whether it is clear or professional. Increasingly, it is judged by whether it feels human.
Use AI to gather the research, summarize the meeting, identify patterns and surface insights. Use it to remind you that someone mentioned their daughter was graduating next month or that they were nervous about becoming a first-time parent.
But when it is time to actually connect with another human being, do not outsource the relationship itself.
At the end of the day, people are not looking to feel processed; they are looking to feel understood.
And no operating system can do that for us.
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To learn more about my GrowUp framework and how it can help grow your leadership style visit: Michelledenogean.com
