INBOX INSIGHTS: What Parts of You Are Replaceable, EU AI Act Compliance (2026-10-28)

INBOX INSIGHTS: What Parts of You Are Replaceable, EU AI Act Compliance (2026-10-28) :: View in browser

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What parts of you are replaceable?

Over the weekend I was catching up with a group of friends. We’re all introverts, which means the catching up happened in a group chat. We were going around sharing what we’d been up to lately, and I mentioned that I’d taught a sold-out workshop at MAICON and that I would need a few weeks to recover.

One of my friends replied, “I forget that we are adults with real jobs and things outside of this group chat. I just went to your website and signed up for your newsletter. Make sure you send me good stuff!”

Hi Susannah! I hope this counts.

It made me laugh, and it also stuck with me, because she’s right. The version of me in that group chat and the version of me who teaches workshops don’t overlap much. With my friends I’m unguarded and pretty silly. At work, I’m not. I’m Gen X, and I was brought up to believe you keep the two separate: your personal life stays at home, and your professional self goes to the office.

Most of us compartmentalize like this to some degree. Some people keep work and life completely walled off. Some go further and build a stage persona that looks nothing like who they are at home. That used to be a personal choice with mostly personal consequences. Now that we’re all trying to replicate ourselves with AI, it’s a content problem.

A lot of content creators and CEOs are working on copies of themselves right now. Creators are training AI on their back catalog so it can write in their voice. CEOs are building digital twins so their thinking can show up in meetings they don’t have time to attend.

The question isn’t whether you can replicate yourself. You can, and the tools get better every month. The question is which version of yourself you’re replicating, and whether it’s the version anyone actually came for.

AI can only copy the compartment you gave it

Everything I’ve fed into my co-ceo skill is professional: newsletters, blog posts, LinkedIn, talks, podcast transcripts, problem solving and decision making. It learned how I sound at work, and it’s good at that. It has never seen the group chat. It doesn’t know what my friends tease me about or what I was laughing at on Saturday.

That’s the gap. My skill can match how I sound, but it can’t know what happened to me this weekend. Voice is how you say things. Material is what you actually have to say, and AI only has the second if you hand it over. Most of us never do, because the material lives in the compartment we were taught to keep out of work.

The result is a copy of the most replaceable part of you. Your credentials, your frameworks and your how-to advice are exactly what AI already produces in bulk for everyone. What nobody else can produce is the stuff from outside work: the opinions you’d only say to friends, the specific details, the things that make people say “that’s so you.” And when your content sounds like everyone else’s, your audience has no reason to pick you over anyone else.

This is a People question before it’s a Platform question. In the 5P Framework by Trust Insights™ (Purpose, People, Process, Platform, Performance), Platform comes fourth. If you start with “which tool can replicate me,” you skip the question of what your audience actually connects with, and you end up automating a version of yourself that nobody would miss.

Sasha Fierce was still Beyoncé

I’m not telling you to bring your whole unfiltered self into every LinkedIn post. Oversharing doesn’t make you relatable. You can share the parts of yourself that you feel comfortable revealing to others. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

A stage persona is fine. Beyoncé had Sasha Fierce. Nobody ever mistook Sasha Fierce for somebody else. She was an amplified version of Beyoncé, not a blank one. A persona works when it’s recognizably you, turned up.

The trouble with a lot of AI-replicated content isn’t that it’s a persona. It’s that it’s nobody in particular.

What to do next

Run the recognition test. Take your last few posts, or the last thing your digital twin produced, and imagine your name isn’t on them. Would the people who know you outside of work recognize them as yours? If the answer is no, the tool is doing exactly what you trained it to do; you just trained it on one facet of yourself.

Bring one thing only you know. Before you hand a draft to AI, add something it couldn’t have come up with on its own, like an observation, an opinion or a detail from your life outside work. AI can clean up the writing, but it can’t supply the material.

If you’re building a twin, give it more than your work history. A digital version of you that has only seen your professional output will give you a professional, generic copy. Decide what else it needs to know to sound like the person your clients and readers actually trust. The same goes if your team writes your LinkedIn posts for you: they can only write the version of you they’ve seen.

Decide where your line is. You get to choose what stays in the group chat. Make that a decision instead of a default you inherited.

What’s one thing your audience doesn’t know about you that influences how you work?

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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss how affordable luxury brands can get started with AI, starting with a clear breakdown of what affordable luxury actually means. You’ll learn how hidden audiences—people your assumptions tell you don’t exist, like gift-givers—may be quietly trying to buy from you right now. You’ll discover how to read AI-era search data in Google Search Console to spot high-intent buyers and uncover gaps your competitors are filling. You’ll also find out how to catch emerging product trends and run competitive research in minutes instead of hiring a pricey research firm. You’ll walk away with three practical, low-cost starting points for using AI in your marketing this holiday season.

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DISCLAIMER: Trust Insights is not a law firm and cannot give legal advice. Consult a qualified attorney in your jurisdiction for legal advice specific to your situation.

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about legal compliance with AI law. As of today, the most stringent laws in effect are in the EU with the EU AI Act, and they apply to any AI system or content that reaches people located in the EU (and this is ANYONE physically on EU soil).

The full text, for your own reference, is here: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/the-act/

In particular, for companies like Trust Insights that are based outside the EU but have EU customers (such as people who subscribe to this newsletter or take courses in our Academy), the EU AI Act DOES apply to us, especially Article 2, section 1, subsection c:

This Regulation applies to: providers and deployers of AI systems that have their place of establishment or are located in a third country, where the output produced by the AI system is used in the Union;

Our blog, our YouTube channel, our email newsletter, our courses? All those content assets reach the EU, and we know this to be true from our analytics, our email list, and our Academy members. Heck, we even get requests for VAT processing of invoices from Academy members in the EU. We cannot plausibly deny that our stuff reaches the EU, and we’re happy about that – anyone, anywhere in the world (except as prohibited by US law or in opposition to our values) is welcome to do business with Trust Insights.

Okay, but how do we know we’re “deployers”?

From Article 3, section 4:

For the purposes of this Regulation, the following definitions apply: ‘deployer’ means a natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body using an AI system under its authority except where the AI system is used in the course of a personal non-professional activity;

If you use AI at work and you have AI-generated or AI-influenced outputs, you are a deployer. Trust Insights is a deployer of AI.

Based on this, what are our obligations? As end-users of AI, as deployers, the clause in the law that affects us directly is Article 50, section 4, excerpted here because it’s a wall of text:

Deployers of an AI system that generates or manipulates image, audio or video content constituting a deep fake, shall disclose that the content has been artificially generated or manipulated.

Deployers of an AI system that generates or manipulates text which is published with the purpose of informing the public on matters of public interest shall disclose that the text has been artificially generated or manipulated. This obligation shall not apply where the use is authorised by law to detect, prevent, investigate or prosecute criminal offences or where the AI-generated content has undergone a process of human review or editorial control and where a natural or legal person holds editorial responsibility for the publication of the content.

Here is our safe, conservative, ethically sound, audit-proof interpretation of these rules that DO apply to us because our content reaches the EU:

Disclose the use of AI for anything public-facing.

That’s it, that’s the tweet. The safest approach for any company using AI that doesn’t want to run afoul of the current strictest law is to disclose the use of AI for anything public-facing. Yes, you can split hairs about what constitutes human-review or what constitutes matters of public interest, but that’s a lot of fancy tap-dancing for very little reward. Why bother when it’s easier to disclose that you made something with AI? It doesn’t have to be in four-foot high blazing red letters. It just has to disclose that your outputs were generated or manipulated by AI.

Disclosure is ethical, in accordance with international law, and provides an audit trail and a good faith effort that you and your legal counsel can rely on should the need ever arise. As laws eventually become stricter to match the gold standard (as happened with GDPR), you likely won’t have to go back and re-work things, and you’ll rarely regret playing it safe.

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.

This is why our capstone course, the AI-Ready Strategist, is different. It’s not a collection of prompting techniques or a set of recipes; it’s about why we do things with AI. AI strategy has nothing to do with prompting or the shiny object of the day — it has everything to do with extracting value from AI and avoiding preventable disasters. This course is for everyone in a decision-making capacity because it answers the questions almost every AI hype artist ignores: Why are you even considering AI in the first place? What will you do with it? If your AI strategy is the equivalent of obsessing over blenders while your steakhouse goes out of business, this is the course to get you back on course.

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Where can you find Trust Insights face-to-face?

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