INBOX INSIGHTS, December 17, 2025: What We Learned About AI, Humanity at Risk - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

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INBOX INSIGHTS: What We Learned About AI, Humanity at Risk (2025-12-17)

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The One Thing We Learned About AI in 2025

If you had told me in January that my biggest takeaway from a year dominated by artificial intelligence would be about being human, I might have rolled my eyes.

We started 2025 with the word “Rooted.” The goal was to establish ourselves deeply and firmly, to hold onto our foundations while the winds of technological change whipped around us. And looking back at the 50+ letters I’ve written to you this year, I realized we didn’t just hold onto those roots—we needed them to survive.

As I reviewed our conversations from this year, from the disasters of “AI-first” replacement strategies to the joy of using AI to plan a garden, three distinct truths emerged about the intersection of humans and machines.

1. The “Soft” Skills Became the Hard Skills

We spent a lot of time this year debunking the idea that technical skills are the only ones that matter. As AI became capable of writing code and generating reports, the things it couldn’t do became our most valuable assets. Critical thinking, empathy, strategic vision, and the ability to navigate complex human dynamics weren’t just “nice to haves”—they were the difference between a successful project and a toxic failure.

We learned that you can’t automate trust. You can’t prompt-engineer psychological safety.

2. Strategy is Nothing Without the “Who” and “How”**

We talked a lot about the 5P Framework (Purpose, People, Process, Platform, Performance) this year. Why? Because time and again, we saw organizations buy the Platform first and ignore the People.

The companies that thrived in 2025 weren’t the ones with the most expensive AI models. They were the ones that:

Prioritized People: They treated AI as a partner to their teams, not a replacement for them.
Respected Process: They realized that automating a broken process just gives you broken results faster.
Defined Purpose: They stopped doing AI for AI’s sake and started solving actual business problems.

3. Fear is a Terrible Leader

We saw some spectacular failures this year—leaders who tried to use technology as a bludgeon, announcing “AI-first” strategies that were really just “people-last” layoffs in disguise. It backfired every single time.

The lesson? Innovation doesn’t happen in a state of panic. It happens when people feel safe enough to experiment, fail, and try again.

Looking to 2026

So, where does that leave us?

As we close the book on 2025, I’m more convinced than ever that the future doesn’t belong to the machines. It belongs to the people who know how to work with them while staying grounded in their humanity.

The tech will keep changing. The models will get faster. The hype cycle will spin up again. But our roots? They held.

Thank you for letting me be a part of your journey this year. It is an honor to be in your inbox.

Here’s to being human in 2026.

Cheers,

– Katie Robbert, CEO

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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss the massive technological shifts driven by generative AI in 2025 and what you must plan for in 2026.

You will learn which foundational frameworks ensure your organization can strategically adapt to rapid technological change. You’ll discover how to overcome the critical communication barriers and resistance emerging among teams adopting these new tools. You will understand why increasing machine intelligence makes human critical thinking and emotional skills more valuable than ever. You’ll see the unexpected primary use case of large language models and identify the key metrics you must watch in the coming year for economic impact. Watch now to prepare your strategy for navigating the AI revolution sustainably.

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

Last time on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Livestream, we reviewed small language models. Catch the episode replay here!

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The 12 Days of AI Use Cases

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Your humanity is at risk.

Quite a bold statement to wrap up the last Trust Insights newsletter of 2025. But it’s a statement that I stand behind. Your humanity is at risk. Not because of artificial intelligence and all that it has achieved this year, but because artificial intelligence makes it too easy to outsource the best parts of being human.

Here’s what I mean. Executive function is composed of four major activities, which I call PODS:

Planning
Organization
Decision-making
Solving problems

These four activities are part of critical thinking. When we give them to a machine, we lose a part of ourselves in the process. when you say, “Hey, ChatGPT, go do this thing” and that’s all the thought you give to it, you are de-skilling yourself. Those executive functions become weaker. You lose the abilities, in the same way that many of us have lost the ability to navigate using a compass and a paper map because tools like Google Maps just make it so easy for it to do it for us.

If there is one skill that I could leave you with as we close out the year, it is this:

Stop asking AI for the answer.

At a minimum, ask AI to give you three answers and perhaps its justifications for them, and then you make the decisions.

You look at the outputs.

You preserve your executive functions.

For example, in preparing the Letters from the Corner Office eBook for Katie, I didn’t have AI draft the foreword. I had it draft three different candidates and then I gave it to Katie and said, “You decide”. In doing so, I’m helping preserve her executive function by making her think as opposed to just handing over finished work.

As we close out the year and look to the year ahead, generative AI is only going to get more powerful. It’s becoming more capable every day. The temptation to simply accept what it gives us will increase every day as we get busier, as we’re asked (perennially) to “do more with less”.

If you want to increase your value as an employee, as a business owner, as a functioning human being, resist the temptation to simply have AI do things for you that are in your wheelhouse. For sure, have it do your expense reports or other things that don’t add value to your career, but when you find yourself just reaching for the easy button, know that it comes at a cost.

We wish you a happy and healthy holiday season and a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.

Almost every AI course is the same, conceptually. They show you how to prompt, how to set things up – the cooking equivalents of how to use a blender or how to cook a dish. These are foundation skills, and while they’re good and important, you know what’s missing from all of them? How to run a restaurant successfully. That’s the big miss. We’re so focused on the how that we completely lose sight of the why and the what.

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