Michael Burtov, who runs the NSU Broward Center of Innovation, predicts that “proprietary observation will beat proprietary data”. For a decade, companies competed on who had the most data and muscle to process it. Now AI makes analysis cheap for everyone. “What becomes rare is not the ability to process information; it is the ability to notice what has not yet been formalized as information.”

So field work comes back. Burtov’s advice to founders is to spend less time asking AI to summarise markets and more time watching real work flows break down. The opportunity isn’t in the dashboard but in the workaround: the sticky note on the monitor, the spreadsheet nobody admits is mission-critical, the late-night phone call, the exception the software never anticipated.

Content works the same way. Much of today’s content is borrowed from what has already been written down. And that’s a problem if you’re after clicks and domain authority.

Google is asking for what machines can’t notice

The first question in Google’s own guidance on helpful content is whether a page provides “original information, reporting, research, or analysis”. It goes on to ask for insight “beyond the obvious”, and for more than rewriting what other sources already say.

So it’s time to get the specific, granular detail that makes content worth clicking, and it’s the one thing your competitors can’t copy, because it comes from your customers and nobody else’s.

The story you’re sitting on

Your clients have war stories, wins and losses, trials and tribulations, anecdotes and pictures. Most of it never gets asked for, so most of it goes to waste. Untapped story is value left on the table.

Noticing also finds things your marketing has missed. Companies don’t buy office coffee machines to save staff a trip to Starbucks. They buy them because the foyer becomes the watercooler, the place colleagues bump into each other and swap what they know. There’s evidence for it: when a bank call centre had whole teams take their coffee breaks together, call-handling time fell by 8% overall and by more than 20% in the weaker teams (Alex Pentland, MIT, Harvard Business Review, 2012). The selling point was there all along. Someone just had to notice it.

What The Copycourse does

We create video content of your clients talking about their world and how it connects to your product. We turn it into material your writers, human and machine, can build on. So keep your current publishing running, and add the content that could only have come from your own relationships.

The noticing is the valuable part and Google and AI can’t wait to come after if you make serve it up to them.