Building Your AI Foundation and Exhuasted? You’re Not Alone.
Human in the Loop Question of the Week:
"Whenever I attend an AI automation workshop or class, I hear the phrase, ‘diamonds in, diamonds out’ (or a more vulgar version thereof). Effectively, the consistent direction is to ensure that the foundational components we provide to an AI are pristine so that the work it produces is, in turn, pristine. My question is this: what the heck goes INTO these “context-setting” files?! (More often than not, instructors spend most of class talking about the automation part of AI and not the foundation or context-setting part.) Can you provide insight here?”
Dear the Human in the Loop,
OMG, yes. Every time I’ve heard/read direction akin to, “Don’t blame the tool, blame the foundation” I get annoyed. VERY annoyed. Often, this counsel is coupled with something like, “It’s just like hiring! You wouldn't onboard a new employee without spending weeks on brand voice, customer psychology, business goals, decision-making frameworks, right?”
Ehrm, wrong. Humans are frequently given a few outdated links, pointed to a cubicle, and told to “figure it out” all the time.
Concurrently, client briefs are rarely perfect, stakeholder-aligned, or fully accurate. (Of late, they’re stuffed with spotty AI-led ‘research’ that can further muck up the works.)
Also, let us not skip over the ‘spend weeks’ part. WEEKS?! Who has ‘weeks’ to give to training a machine?! What happened to driving efficiency? Saving hours in the day? “Weeks” is the opposite.
Honestly, if these solid foundations were out there just laying around and all it took was “15 minutes to upload the documents to Claude,” we wouldn’t be seeing the rise of AI “brain fry.”
Don’t get it twisted. There IS a ton of work that goes into a fully articulated, properly researched ICP (ideal customer profile), a differentiated brand voice (to which stakeholders are aligned), and the associated content pillar/ platform plan (replete with performance history to underpin the direction).
This is why real, human-led agencies exist. This work takes a great deal of … well, work.
I frequently hear from organizations that don’t know “where to start with AI” (or conversely, they don’t WANT to start because they know they’re opening the door to ‘weeks of work’). I don’t blame them; it’s kind of like the adult equivalent of being told to clean your room.
HOWEVER, a clean room feels nice and you don’t have to wipe the baseboards to make it so. You can pick up the laundry, change the sheets, dust, and feel like a new person. Similarly, to start ‘cleaning up’ your client foundation, you’ll want to begin with three key aspects. (Yes, there are many more components than this. You can spend considerable time on tech stack(s), structuring agents/workflows, token budgets, etc., but I wouldn’t do any of that without laying these first three bricks:
✔ A Brand voice review: Examine all existing content for tone, consistently used data points/terminology, differentiated POVs.
Produce (or update) a do/don’t document (for both humans and AI). This should also clearly provide a “Source of Truth” to which all efforts can support moving forward (critical for AI visibility).
✔ ICP (i.e., Ideal Customer Profile) data: Can take many forms, based on vertical. Generally, it should include a healthy mix of: pain points, psychographics, and decision triggers.
Produce a profile (and/or ‘synthetic persona’) … but please, PLEASE never forget that humans are human. We’re full of foibles and quirks that simply cannot always be documented.
✔ Onboarding: Centralize client/project information. Keep briefing documents, agendas, approvals, decks in one place for the whole team to access. Ensure everyone is aware of the “guardrails” and “wins” for each partner/project (so that you don’t have to keep learning teammate by teammate.)
Produce one document with links to what exists and where. I have done this for years (pre-AI) and it has served my teams and me incredibly well.
Once again, ‘classic’ wisdom presides. The companies producing differentiated content are spending time on their foundations – making the calls and articulating the guidance that will help their teams thrive. A strong foundation is (and has been) the competitive advantage.
Abby Lovett, Founder & AI Visibility Advisor, CTP Visibility Advisors. Author of "Super Human: 8 'SMALL' Ways to Be Super at What You Do…and Human While You Do It."
