Welcome back to Koozai Couch, our interview series where we talk to people from across the digital marketing spectrum about the ideas, tools, and changes shaping the industry.
This time we talked to Leonardo Chinchillaa professor at the University of Costa Rica, shared with us about the dangers of mass automation, why the human side of writing is more important in an AI-intensive market, and why digital marketing may need to take a few steps back moving forward.
Leonardo is a writer, educator, and digital marketing specialist with experience in digital PR, persuasive communication, and audience-focused writing. As a published fiction author and freelance blogger, he combines creative storytelling with the strategic use of language to engage different audiences.
He currently teaches composition and rhetoric at the University of Costa Rica, with a particular focus on creating compelling, well-structured narratives. His work also links academic thinking with the practical use of technologies such as artificial intelligence in marketing.
Interview
For every Koozai Couch, we ask the same five questions to get a quick but useful snapshot of what people are seeing, using and rethinking in digital marketing.
This is what Leonardo said.
1. What’s the one thing the industry is getting completely wrong right now?
Mass automation.
It seems to me that in the process of adapting to the market, we have automated so many things that we have begun to lose our grip on what makes a business feel real: the human touch.
Automated systems can work brilliantly for digital natives, but they can also leave behind older generations and people with additional accessibility needs.
There is still a real need for humanity in our operations, whether that’s customer service, placing an order, or just giving someone confidence that the brand is legitimate and not a scam.
We need to ensure that efficiency does not come at the expense of being inclusive, accessible and humane.
2. What tool or resource has recently changed the way you work?
Adobe Express.
I find it more user-friendly than Canva, but the biggest change for me was the scheduling and integration features.
I linked my LinkedIn and Instagram accounts, so I could plan an entire content strategy from one app.
It also allows you to customize messaging for each platform, which means I can tweak content as needed instead of just posting exactly the same thing everywhere.
Having the planning, creation, and scheduling parts of the process together made content management much easier.
3. What is something you have changed your mind about in the past 12 months?
The idea that artificial intelligence will replace us and our creativity.
I deal with AI-generated writing every day, and when it comes to transcription, I still find human writing far more compelling than anything AI produces, no matter how carefully I instruct tools like Claude or ChatGPT.
I think our increasing exposure to AI-generated content has made people less interested in writing that appears to be machine-generated and more interested in identifying the human behind the narrative.
For this reason, the version sold can be full of texture. Different rhythms and punctuation, flashes of personality, and sparks of metaphorical or creative writing can help the person behind the words stand out.
AI will not replace us as long as we continue to fuel our writing rather than allowing it to be shaped by AI.
It also means continuing to read works written by people. If we want to produce distinctively human writing, we must continue to expose ourselves to it.
4. What are you reading, watching or listening to that others in the digital space should know?
I’m currently re-reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow By Yuval Noah Harari.
It’s one of those books that you can read more than once and still come to a new understanding every time.
For me, it raises meaningful questions about the ethics of applying AI in our lives and, by extension, in digital marketing.
The book looks to the distant future, but some of the questions it raises now seem remarkably close to our present.
For anyone thinking about how technology impacts people, behavior and society, it offers a lot to consider.
5. Where is digital marketing headed in the next 12 months?
Digital marketing moves forward by taking a few steps back.
It’s time for us to adapt to smarter consumers.
If people lose interest in reading a description once they think it’s been produced by AI, perhaps because of its sales-focused and overly optimistic tone, we’ll need to approach our writing with an increasingly acute and educated human eye.
The same applies to photos. If audiences get tired of AI-generated images because there are too many of them, we will need to find ways to bring the human elements back in and give the message space to transcend the noise.
We are used to fighting the hype created by reputable competitors. Now, we also have to combat some of the noise we create ourselves with the speed and volume of AI-powered content.
This means we need to write more sharply than ever before.
This is our next challenge.
Thank you, Leo!
Thanks so much to Leonardo for joining us on the Koozai sofa.
His answers highlight a challenge that marketers are likely to keep coming back to: Technology can make our work faster and more efficient, but efficiency alone doesn’t make communication effective.
As AI makes it easier to produce more content, differentiation may increasingly depend on things that are difficult to automate. Character, judgement, creativity, and true human understanding all have a role to play.
For marketers, the answer may not be to reject AI. It may simply be a matter of ensuring that the technology supports the human behind the work rather than drowning it out.
Catch up on previous Koozai Couch interviews
Want to hear more perspectives across digital marketing?
Connect with Sean Barber, SEO Director at Macmillan Cancer Support and host of Search with Sean, or read our interview with Erin Simmons, Managing Director at Women in Tech SEO.
Keep an eye on the Koozai Blog for more Koozai Couch interviews, practical digital marketing insights and opinions from people working across the industry.
