At Humble, we make a surprising number of films about AI using real people.
Not avatars. Not synthetic presenters. Bonafide, human people.
That’s particularly interesting to me because a lot of our clients are right at the front of the AI frontier. They’re building it, integrating it, selling it and helping other organisations understand what it can do.
But when it comes to explaining the work, they almost always want a real person in front of the camera.
AI is very good at delivering information in new and interesting ways but it isn’t great at conveying emotions (yet) and that’s exactly where trust lives – in our emotional response to information.
It comes from seeing someone speak plainly. Hearing the hesitation before an answer. Watching their expression change when they talk about something they genuinely care about.
It comes from believing there’s a person behind the promise.
That matters even more when the thing being sold is unfamiliar, technically complicated or potentially unsettling. There’s an old ad saying that suggests many good ads “Make the old feel new and the new feel familiar”. That’s why human presence isn’t just a stylistic choice in these films – It’s strategic.
Here’s a thought – The more technology removes people from the process, the more important it may become to put people back into the story. Something that feels both counterintuitive and completely obvious all at once.
We’re using some of the most advanced technology ever created.
And one of the very best ways to sell it is to point a camera at a real person and let them talk about it.