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AI is going to expose every weak business model. And the only thing left will be YOU.

In this episode, I talk about why speed and information are no longer enough, and why your mission, your voice, and your emotional connection to your audience matter more than ever.

Key Takeaways

• AI will only replace the businesses (and people) who don’t adapt 

• Information by itself is no longer enough.

• Your voice, heart and soul are the only thing AI doesn’t have.

This is part 2 of my unpopular 2026 opinions series!

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

AI is going to expose every week business model. What AI is great at, and it’s going to continue to do is speed. Speed and also information. The emotional connection we have to the things that AI cannot be because they are not you, becomes 100 times more important. You are the one thing that I don’t have that AI doesn’t have that competitors in your industry don’t have, but you’ve gotta be connected to you.

AI is going to expose the businesses who do not give a shit about their customers. We’re in a revolutionary time. That’s the reality. Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends. They pave the way they lead from within. Move by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission. Hello everybody.

Welcome back to the podcast. This episode is coming out on Thanksgiving Day in the us. I know, I know Canada already had their Thanksgiving, but I of course want to take a moment and express how grateful I am for this community to this community, to anyone who listens to this podcast. It is my greatest honor to be able to create content from my heart and use my experience in business and life and have even the smallest impact on any of you.

And I’ve had this podcast for over seven years. Actually, I think that I started it around November, if I’m remembering the exact date, it was November. 2018. ’cause when we moved to Texas and I started the podcast right around that same time, so I wish I knew the exact birthday of it, but I think it’s been about exactly seven years and some of you guys have been around since then, which is incredible.

And I’m so grateful for the time and the energy and the trust and the connection and. All of you getting to witness you in growing your business, growing yourself, having your impact and fulfilling your purpose. So thank you. And I hope if you are celebrating today, you have an absolutely beautiful day.

And sometimes my team’s like, should we put this episode out, you know, on Thanksgiving or not? But I, I think people over the weekend actually consume more and so, you know, have more moments to go for a walk and tune into a podcast. And so. We usually still put out a podcast episode, so this episode will be the second in my four part series I’m doing, which is around.

My unpopular predictions for 2026. And before I dive into that, I do wanna mention that if you are tuning into this episode on Black Friday weekend, we are running a Black Friday promotion. It is our best and biggest sale of the year where we actually offer a full-blown strategy call and strategy creation for your business for like 80% off our regular price.

It’s a crazy deal. We did it last year and we sold out really quickly. So we get on a one-on-one call with you, and then we create your entire 360 marketing strategy from your funnel to your messaging, to auditing your offer or helping you with developing that offer that you’re gonna create to the email marketing, to the ads and traffic strategy, entire presentation.

And we do, we market 80% off for Black Friday only, and it’s only for through Cyber Monday. So a few days. So if you go to embodiedmarketing.com/strategy, you can check that offer out. We will cap it out because we actually meet with every business one-on-one. And so last year we did sell out on the strategies.

All right, let’s dive in to today’s prediction. My second unpopular prediction is that AI is going to expose every week business model, but I’m gonna talk about this a little bit different than how I think most people talk about ai. I think most people talk about AI from a very much a place of fear and also replacing what they do, and also automation and speed.

Which is all valid. I’m not saying any of that is, is valid except for the replacing. I, I think AI will only replace the businesses and the people who, who don’t adapt with it, who don’t, you know, people who, who work in a company. AI is only gonna replace the people who don’t use it, and AI is only gonna replace the companies who don’t pivot and adapt to still be valuable.

Despite ai, I’m not worried about AI replacing me and my company. Because honestly, first of all, what good does that do? Worrying about it, number two. I can’t control ai. I can’t control the rollout of it, so it doesn’t even matter what I think or don’t think. I can control my response and I can control my actions.

And so I know that I don’t wanna be passive or. Ignorant to the reality. And so I think AI is going to expose all the businesses. It already has started, but it’s going to continue who have not adapted their model and have a weak business model. So what do I mean? In order for us to understand the type of business model that you have to have with ai, you have to understand what is AI gonna do within your niche.

Some are gonna be impacted more. I feel like my marketing company is going to be impacted definitely more than like an in a service business, an in-person. I show up at your house, I do work type of business, right? So what is AI going to impact? In general? What AI is great at, and it’s going to continue to do is speed.

Speed and also information AI has now made it so that. Access to information is so easy and so fast compared to how it used to. So what will happen and is happening is that people are going to now expect that as the norm. That I don’t need to go and learn as much in terms of watching videos and consuming in that way because I can just ask, chat and have a whole conversation and get my question answered and get actions that I can go take and go get exactly what I’m supposed to do.

I also can go do that in 30 seconds, and so I don’t need to take a ton of time and I can get what I want faster. And AI in general. Is a mechanism of speed. It’s going to make things faster. It’s going to increase the capacity that humans have to do what humans do. Humans are still gonna be needed, but they will have to work with AI in 10 years from now.

I mean, who knows what this world will be like in 10 years from now, but I do know that every single person, AI will be so normal. It’ll be like the internet. And is it scary to think about with my kids? Absolutely. But I have zero control over that. I only have control over how I raise them now, how I show up now and the decisions I make now.

And so that is what I choose to focus on, and that is where I choose to put my energy. I’ve been saying this for a long time with marketing, but when we think about AI and we go, okay, in in, in the sense of our marketing and our business, what do we have that AI doesn’t? Well, we have a heart. We have a soul, we have emotions, we have connection.

We have an energetic frequency that whether you believe that or not, it’s true. It’s not the same as ai, which is a robot. So if we know that that’s the value that we bring, that AI does not, that means that. The emotional connection we have with our audience, with our people, with the people we wanna serve, the emotional connection to our mission, to our messaging, to our voice, to the things that AI cannot be because they are not you, becomes.

100 times more important, that soul of your business, which is driven by your heart, your mission, your purpose, why you are here, who you are as a person is the magic. And I got so heated on a webinar recently talking about this because I was like, I am so tired of everybody trying to convince you that the answer to your business being successful and your marketing working is outside of you.

And is by you following what somebody else says to do. Absolutely. Are there templates and frameworks and processes that are good and can work well? Absolutely. Yes. But you are the magic. You are the one thing that I don’t have that AI doesn’t have that competitors in your industry don’t have, but you’ve gotta be connected to you.

You’ve gotta be connected to your mission. You’ve gotta be connected to the things that you are here to say, to the beliefs that you have into that conviction. So when we look at AI is going to expose business models that no longer work, one of those is extremely surface level, honestly, money motivated businesses.

I believe money is a byproduct. Money is like the lowest. On the list of motivation for a business because money will happen if the other things are in place. If the purpose, if the mission, if the expertise and connection is in place to serve your audience, money’s just gonna happen. It doesn’t need to be a motivation.

AI is going to expose the businesses who do not give a shit. About their customers, the businesses who don’t actually care about their audience, who don’t care, and they don’t have passion and they don’t have conviction, and they don’t have connection backing what they’re doing. I just got really heated over that.

AI’s gonna expose that and, and I think a lot of my audience on here, you guys have it, so lean into it because. So much of what I talk about is, is heart-centered marketing and heart-centered business and embodiment. Right. And you know, honestly, I think, I think when I started my company, you know, 10 years ago, I started in the first few years of my company, I think that there were a lot of companies in the digital marketing space that could survive without the heart, unfortunately.

But that, that’s a house of cards. It doesn’t work forever. I think now it’s almost impossible because people see through it. Because the more we have ai, the more people are gonna want that connection, that human heart-centered connection. And you can feel it like when you read copy online. And it is missing that, and I’m not saying like it’s not about, it uses AI or it doesn’t use ai.

We, I use AI for my copy, but you almost, I think would never know because it, it’s always backed. First of all, I don’t a hundred percent use it. It’s a supporting tool. Second of all, it’s always backed by a connection and an emotion. It, it’s always like checked through this filter of my heart and you know, when my team writes it, it’s like connected to the voice and the brand and the conviction behind that.

And people know people more than ever are craving organic, genuine, authentic connection. AI is gonna expose the businesses who don’t have that AI is going to expose the businesses who have not asked themselves. How do I meet my ideal customer where they’re at right now, given the AI industry we are in, in the AI era we are in?

And if we know that AI is creating this need for speed and lowering the need for information being valuable. How do we meet that in our offers? How do we create the result faster? How do we make it easier for people? How do we leverage our proprietary process and our methods in everything we do? Because it’s what AI doesn’t have.

How do we work with AI to still be valuable? And there are some business owners who are overwhelmed by this, and so they ignore it and they think it’s. I don’t know what they think. I think they’re just kind of running from it. AI’s gonna expose this, and so this is the year to double down, triple down on your messaging, on the depth within your messaging and how you serve your ideal customer and how you show up and how you create that connection, create that result.

Communicate it with conviction, communicate it with heart, and it’s the year to probably double down on, on how are you gonna pivot if you haven’t already? I think most offers are having to change, and I’ve spoken a lot about this on the podcast in terms of taking your, taking your proprietary methods in your process and, and your wisdom and, and how you get the result you get.

And infusing that with ai. And that’s what I’ve done in my programs. That’s what I believe the future is of digital products, of services. You name it, like we’re in a revolutionary time. That’s the reality. And we get to be leaders within that and say, let’s pave the way. Let’s come up with the new ideas.

Let’s innovate. But that takes intention doing that. And it also takes that, that connection of how do I create more human connection? And depth in my business, you know, and, and the reality is like, I don’t believe AI can replace humans. I think that people are going to crave the in-person connection and the heart.

Organic realness that comes behind a human the more we use ai. ’cause it’s gonna be lonely. And yes, like is it scary? Is it concerning? You know, is it gonna create a whole bunch of problems? Probably. Probably. Do we have any control over it? No. So how do we become the solution? How do we pave the way? How do we say, here’s the problems AI’s gonna create, it’s gonna solve all of these.

It’s gonna create opportunity over here, but it’s also gonna create these problems. And so how do we solve that? Or how do we meet people where they’re at in the reality of where we’re going? And you know, it’s, it’s just like if we go back to the internet, right? I think AI is bigger than the internet, but if we go back to the.

Internet. Every business who did not do these exact things, the internet exposed the weaknesses, and they eventually do become irrelevant. But if you look at it this way and you go, how do I become the solution? How do I infuse this into my mission? How do I double down on my mission? How do I create more depth?

How do I create more connection? How do I do all the things that AI doesn’t have? So that I can stand out, so that I can still be a solution, so that I can still have that connection, maybe more. So then you’ve created opportunity and now you know there is so much opportunity. There is so much because new also creates opportunity.

It creates, it creates problems, and it creates the need to pivot, but it also creates that opportunity. So that’s what I think next year. You know, it’s already important, but it’s just gonna become more important. I think it’s exciting because whenever this happens, it’s like, here’s all the businesses and then the businesses who do this come here and these ones go away.

And now there’s like more opportunity. And it’s kind of like this natural adjustment that happens when an industry gets saturated, which is what we see in a lot of industries right now. And there’s gonna be this adjustment. So you guys are gonna be the ones who prioritize this because I’m asking you the questions and you’re able to come up with the actions.

Based on this perspective and this, this next event in January in Austin, we’re gonna do AI workshops. We’re gonna speak about this. We also are doing a specific workshop with savi who was on my podcast where we’re gonna talk. And come up with your message and your content, because I just think that’s so powerful right now is how to amplify that message in your voice and what you wanna say that other people are not saying.

So we’re gonna do that on day one, and then on day three on the VIP day, you actually get to create some content with that. So it’s gonna be super cool. So if you wanna sign up for the event, I’ll drop that link to embodiedmarketing.com/live. Thank you guys for tuning in. I’ve got two more unpopular truths, unpopular predictions for 2026 coming next week on the Tuesday, Thursday Podcast Drop.

Hope you guys are enjoying the series and have a beautiful Thanksgiving holiday, Thanksgiving weekend if you celebrate. If not, never hurts. To take a moment to just be grateful.