The Illusion of Insight: Why AI Can’t Tell You What Your Customers Really Think
- Matt Clutterham
- Jul 7
- 5 min read
Think AI and online tools give you great customer insight? Think again. Discover why real strategy starts offline and what to do to truly understand your audience.
Introduction
A few years ago, I was sitting in a meeting, watching a client proudly present their new “customer insights.”
Forty slides. Glossy graphs. Word clouds built from thousands of scraped comments.
They’d paid a lot for this. The language was polished. The conclusions were convincing.
But something didn’t sit right.
So I asked one question: “Have you spoken to any of them?”
The room went quiet. One of the directors fidgeted. Another gave me that polite, tight smile that says we thought you’d be impressed.
They hadn’t. Not one real conversation. Not one awkward pause or “hmm” or half-truth to probe deeper. Just digital data, run through a tool, dressed up as insight.
And in that moment, I remembered a community project, and one of the participants, a single mum, early thirties, quiet, worn down, was sharing her experience using a local service.
She didn’t use brand words. She didn’t say anything “insightful” by business standards. But then she paused, looked down, and said something I’ll never forget:
“It’s just… no one ever really asks.”
Not just about the product. About her. About what it actually felt like to be her, day to day. Her tone wasn’t angry, just tired. But that sentence hit me harder than any research or training I’d ever seen.
And I realised then: Most brands aren’t missing insight. They’re missing humility.
The humility to listen. The patience to sit in the discomfort. The willingness to dig beneath the surface and see people as they are not just as data points to profile.
Since that day, I’ve never trusted a spreadsheet on its own.
Because behind every persona is a person.
And behind every click, a context you’ll never understand unless you’ve been in the room.
That moment rewired how I work. It still does.
In 2025, it’s easier than ever to feel like you know your customer.
Type a prompt into an AI tool, and you can generate entire personas based on thousands of online data points.
Reddit threads.
Product reviews.
Blog comments.
LinkedIn posts.
Twitter storms.
It looks impressive. It feels smart.
But it’s not insight. It’s inference.
And it’s leading a lot of businesses down a very expensive rabbit hole.
Let’s unpack why.
We Live in the Age of Digital Performance
To understand the illusion, you have to understand the context we’re all swimming in.
The modern web is not a mirror, it’s a stage.
People don’t share their reality online.
They share their role.
Their aspirations.
Their self-image.
Their tribe identity.
Psychologists call this impression management. The subconscious or deliberate act of presenting ourselves in a way that will be accepted, admired, or validated by others.
And it’s amplified online:
On LinkedIn, people project competence and leadership.
On Twitter, they signal intellect or values.
On Instagram, they display beauty, success, or adventure.
On Reddit, they play the contrarian, the expert, or the outraged observer.
This isn’t lying. It’s human.
As social psychologist Erving Goffman said in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, we are always “performing” for the audience around us, shifting tone, language, and stories depending on what we think will get the response we want.
The kicker?
Most of us don’t even realise we’re doing it.
So what happens when AI models are trained on this theatre?
They don’t decode truth.
They amplify performance.
The Real Cost of AI-Led “Insight”
When businesses build their customer strategy on scraped online data, they’re not building understanding. They’re building mythology.
And the costs show up fast:
Messaging misses the mark because it speaks to the aspirational version of your customer, not their lived reality.
Product development stalls because it solves stated desires, not real problems.
Sales cycles slow down because people sense the disconnect—you’re selling to who they say they are, not who they really are.
It’s like listening to someone’s dating profile and thinking you know how they behave in a relationship.
It’s not just flawed. It’s fiction.
What AI Can’t See
AI can do a lot. But it can’t feel tension in a room. It can’t notice the micro-expression when a topic hits a nerve. It can’t follow the thread of contradiction when someone says one thing, but their story says another.
And it certainly can’t see the three most critical forces behind every decision your customer makes:
Cognitive Dissonance - The internal discomfort we feel when our actions don’t align with our values or self-image. You won’t hear this in reviews, but you’ll feel it in a live conversation.
Social Identity Theory - We don’t just buy products, we buy identity. We align with brands that signal “who we are” or “who we want to be. ”This plays out in silence, in choice, in gut reaction, not in words.
Heuristics & Bias - Our brains are lazy. We use shortcuts, rules of thumb, and biases to make decisions fast. These don’t show up in rational language, but they dominate behaviour.
In short: the juice doesn’t live in the language. It lives in the limbic system.
The subconscious.
The messy human layer that AI can’t reach.
So What’s the Alternative? Go Real-World. Go Deeper.
At Q Branch, we don’t guess. We go.
We sit in rooms with customers.
We watch. We listen. We don’t just ask what they think, we observe what they do. We study the difference between language and behaviour. Between stated need and actual desire.
This is where insight lives.
Not in dashboards.
In discomfort.
It’s slower. It’s messier. It doesn’t scale like AI. But it works.
Every single time.
Because once you see the real patterns, the emotional drivers, the identity shifts, the unmet needs then and only then can you build:
✅ Messaging that resonates.
✅ Positioning that cuts through.
✅ Offers that land.
✅ Campaigns that convert.
If You Want Real Insight, Do These 4 Things
Ditch the Digital Echo Chamber - If all your customer understanding is coming from scraped data, pause. Look for what’s missing, not what’s loud.
Invest in Ethnographic Research - Real insight comes from context. Go where your customers are. Observe. Ask better questions. Sit in the silence.
Create Emotional Hypotheses - Instead of “what do our customers want?”, ask “what do they need to feel to choose us?” Then test against real reactions.
Bring in External Perspective - You can’t read the label from inside the jar. We help you see what you can’t see, using psychology, neuroscience, and human insight to reveal the truth.
It’s Time to Wake Up
We’re not anti-AI.
We use it.
We love it.
But we are anti-lazy thinking.
Anti-illusion.
Anti-insight theatre.
The brands that win in the next decade won’t be the ones who mine the most data.
They’ll be the ones who understand people the most deeply.
So the real question isn’t “What does the data say?”
It’s “Have you been in the room lately?”
Because that’s where the strategy starts.
Matt Clutterham
Matt Clutterham is an award winning brand strategist, mentor, and co-founder of Q Branch Consulting, where bold clarity meets real-world results. Known for helping ambitious businesses move from generic to unforgettable, Matt specialises in positioning, messaging, and mindset work that unlocks growth. He blends strategy, psychology, and storytelling to transform how companies communicate and scale. From public companies to changemaker founders, clients come to Matt when they’re ready to stop playing small and start owning their onlyness. If you’re ready to cut through the noise, align your team, and lead with bold purpose, he’s the strategist you call.
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