More than a decade ago, I created this trailer for my book, X: The Experience When Business Meets Design. For reasons I can no longer remember, I never released it.

It became a lost trailer from the digital era. Yet the idea behind it may be even more important in the AI era.

At the time, customers were changing faster than the experiences companies designed for them. Digital, mobile, and social technologies were reshaping how people communicated, discovered, purchased, shared, and lived. But most businesses were responding by adapting existing experiences to new channels rather than reimagining them for a new world.

Websites became digital versions of stores. Mobile apps became smaller websites. Social media became another broadcasting channel.

The technology was new. The thinking behind it often was not.

Brand experience, customer experience, user experience, product experience, service experience, digital experience, and physical experience were still designed independently, often by different teams pursuing different objectives.

X argued that these were never truly separate experiences. They were all part of one experience as lived by the customer.

They needed to be designed collectively, cohesively, and purposefully around the human being moving through them.

A Timeless Idea from the Digital Era

I chose this moment with Steve Jobs because he articulated something every leader still needs to hear: start with the experience you want to create for people, then work backward to the technology.
That sounds obvious. It rarely is.

Companies naturally begin with what they make, what they sell, how they operate, and what their technology can do. Over time, the product, process, and business model become the lens through which leaders see the customer.

But customers do not experience an organizational chart. They do not care which department owns a touchpoint or which platform powers it. They experience one company, one brand, and one connected, or disconnected, journey.

This is the value of being a product company that is not led solely by the product, but by the said and unsaid, the seen and unseen, the pain and joy of what customers experience compared with what they could experience.

Customers know what they know. They know what sucks, and they know what is extraordinary. Those are the two experiences they remember.

Everything in the middle is forgettable.

The AI Era Is Repeating the Digital Era’s Mistake

The technology has changed. The pattern has not.

In the race to build with AI, too many organizations are once again beginning with the technology. They are asking what AI can automate, accelerate, generate, optimize, or eliminate.

Those questions may produce efficiency. They do not necessarily produce innovation.

The more important question is: What can people experience now that was never possible before?

AI should not simply be inserted into yesterday’s customer journey, product, service, workflow, or business model. That is the AI equivalent of shrinking a website to fit a mobile screen and calling it transformation.

The opportunity is to work backward from an experience worth creating.

What should become easier, more intuitive, more personal, more useful, more human, or even more magical? What frustration should disappear? What unmet need could finally be addressed? What could a person accomplish, feel, or become that they could not before?

That is where AI becomes more than another technology layer. It becomes an ingredient in meaningful experience innovation.

AI Cannot Replace the Source of Differentiation

AI can recognize patterns. It can synthesize information, generate possibilities, simulate scenarios, and help us build and learn at extraordinary speed.

But AI cannot build intuition.

AI cannot feel understanding.

AI cannot internalize empathy.

There are insights in talking to people, listening to them, observing them, and embracing empathy before vision and strategy. When you open your heart and mind, you begin to hear things others do not. You begin to see things others cannot.

The unsaid and the unseen…that is the differentiation.

AI can help you act on those insights, scale them, personalize them, and continuously improve them. But leaders and teams still have to care enough to discover them.

The opportunity is to build a company rich with the insight and inspiration needed to create value customers will feel immediately.

Then productize empathy. Operationalize it. Optimize it. Scale it with AI.

But never automate away the humanity that made the experience worth creating in the first place.

A Lost Trailer with a Message for the AI Era

I made this trailer before the current AI revolution. Yet it asks the question that still matters most:

Are we starting with the technology, or are we starting with the experience?

More than a decade later, the tools are exponentially more powerful. The possibilities are far greater. The responsibility to design purposefully is even more urgent.

Start with people. Imagine an experience worth remembering. Then use AI to make it possible.

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