Why does every AI-written page and AI-designed site look like every other one?
Run the same brief through five AI design tools and you get the same colors, the same fonts, the same layout. AI copywriting converges the same way. The result is a race to similarity, and the fix is not better prompts. It is categorical differentiation: a difference big enough that a customer files you in a box of your own. Josh Lowman, founder of the category-design studio Goldfront, joined The Artificial Intelligence Podcast to explain how to build that difference, and how to go all in on AI without gutting the team that has to deliver it.
What is categorical differentiation?
It is a difference that changes which mental box a customer puts you in, rather than a claim that you are better inside the existing box. Human minds categorize everything, and people give their attention to things that are different. Lowman's test is whether he actually believes a difference is categorical before he markets against it, because the natural pull inside a company is to call "easier to use", "faster" or "more features" differentiation when it is only incremental.
Two things follow from owning a category. If you are number one in a category, you have a good chance of being irreplaceable, because customers do not treat the leader as interchangeable with the runner-up. And if you are new, a real category difference is what gets you attention in the first place, which is the hardest part of starting anything.
How do you create a new category?
There are three routes Lowman names. The first is a technological innovation so different that it is undeniable; his example is a CRM that moved from on-premise software to the cloud, which was still a CRM but a categorically different one. The second is to serve and obsess over one kind of customer, the way a business-focused social network stopped competing with the consumer ones even though both are social networks. The third is to do every single little thing differently, so the accumulated vibe becomes a category of its own rather than a list of features.
Can you adopt AI without gutting your team?
Yes, if you make the promise explicit and tie it to the number that actually threatens it. Lowman told his staff, "I'm not going to lay anybody off. If we don't lose revenue." The reasoning is that the real risk is falling prices as AI does more of what an agency sells, so revenue is the trigger, not headcount. The host's point is that the opposite approach backfires: tell employees an AI project is training their replacement and they will sabotage it, which is how most AI projects fail.
The structural half of the answer is to give everyone their own agent instead of concentrating agents with the owner. Lowman rebuilt his agency's back end around AI and then issued an agent to each employee, with the agents able to talk to one another, so the setup reads as one human, one agent rather than owners with tools and staff with none. It does not remove the fear, but it gives people a reason to go all in.
Which work should you automate and which should stay human?
Split it into money and love. Lowman's framing is that "we all want money and love", and customers do not want to pay human rates for highly functional work that software can do just as well: transactions, back-office processing, anything where the result is the same either way. The love side is where customers need to know the people behind the product truly care about solving their problem, and that only comes from intimacy: being there with them, hearing the problems, getting into their shoes. Feeling is also the part machines cannot fake. As Lowman puts it, "The real way to differentiate and persuade another human being is to show them that you feel something."
What to do to stand out when AI makes everyone sound the same
Test your differentiation claim before you spend against it. If it is faster, easier to use or more features, it is incremental, and the market will read it as incremental too.
Pick one of the three routes to a real category: a technological difference so large it is undeniable, obsessive service of one specific kind of customer, or doing every little thing differently until the difference becomes the vibe.
Sort your work into money and love. Automate the functional work customers will not pay human rates for, and keep humans on the work where care and intimacy are the product. Keep talking to customers yourself, because they tell you earliest when something is wrong, usually before you have built the thing nobody wants.
If you are rolling AI out internally, make the no-layoff commitment conditional on revenue holding, and give every employee their own agent rather than keeping the agents with ownership.
Put real feeling in front. Lowman's point is that these models have no feelings, no emotional intelligence and no irrationality, so the feeling in your communications is the one input a competitor cannot get from the same model.
The category is the tool. The thing it protects is a customer who would say, if you took the product away, that there is nothing else they could replace it with.
Original show notes
Can AI help your business stand out — or does it just make everyone sound the same? Jonathan Green talks with Josh Lowman, founder of category-design studio Goldfront, about creating real categorical differentiation, going all-in on AI without gutting your team, and why human feeling is the one thing the machines can't fake.
Key Takeaways: • Don't differentiate incrementally ("faster, more features") — create a real category • Being first in a category (or obsessively serving one customer) makes you irreplaceable • You can adopt AI without gutting your team — give everyone their own agent and protect jobs while revenue holds • AI drives a "race to similarity" (AI slop); human feeling is the differentiator • Automate the functional "money" work; keep the human "love" work — that's what customers won't pay a robot for
Notable Quotes: "The real way to differentiate and persuade another human being is to show them that you feel something." — Josh Lowman "If we keep revenue flat, no one is getting laid off — that's my promise to you." — Josh Lowman
Connect with Josh Lowman: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshlowman Website: https://goldfront.com
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Auto-generated transcript, 4,934 words. Timestamps link to the moment in the episode.
Can AI help your business find its story with today's amazing special guest, Josh Lowman. Now, Josh, I'm excited to have you here because you're an exactly the type of business that everyone thinks AI is going to make disappear. And I think that's because most people think of advertising as the final touch. They think it's the commercial, not everything that goes before that, the strategy, the voice, and figuring out what your market actually is. I've seen so many businesses that aren't even sure who their customer base
is. I talk to a lot of startups and I say, what problem do you solve? And they're like, we're not sure, but we do something cool. So they haven't even figured that out yet, let alone what their industry is. So I'd really love to just start by understanding exactly how you help companies figure out what their category is and how a company can figure out if they're in the wrong category or even before they try to kind of dominate their category.
~ huh. Okay. well, it's really nice to be here. so to try to answer your question, first of all, I run a company called gold front. We are a category design studio and, we help companies differentiate in, on a level that goes beyond, what most companies do to differentiate, which is incremental, ~ differentiation. And we teach and help our, founders, CEOs, marketing leaders, create categorical differentiation between them and their competition. And that's what we mean by own your category or create a category.
And now I'm forgetting what the question was in the first place, but what was the question? It's really exactly that. First of all, it's that a lot of people mingle what you do with marketing. think marketing is well, AI can make videos now, so I don't need to work with any type of marketing agency. you And then the second part is just what you're getting into is what exactly is a category? How do I know what category I'm in? Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
And am I in the wrong category? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So in the world of technology, it is very common that new categories are created and that word category is very, very important because the human mind categorizes everything. And there's some very special qualities to categories that make it a really useful thing for us to do marketing around. Now, I do not think of category is something that you must do or, or, I don't think of that as like the be all end all.
think that the be all end all is to create a business and a product that is irreplaceable in the mind of the customer. That if you were to take that product away, the customer would go, I need that back. There is nothing else that I can, I can replace this with. And. ~ category just happens to be, I think maybe the best tool for getting to that place. And what I mean by that is first of all, if you are number one in the category,
you have a very good chance of being irreplaceable. There are a lot of people who would not replace their Coca-Cola with Pepsi. They don't see it as the same thing. And it has to do with Coca-Cola's number one place in the category. Number two is if you are new and you're trying to differentiate in a crowded customers will give you a lot of attention if you created a new category. So if you say we're a categorically different CRM, a totally different way to do this,
like for example, when Salesforce created CRM in the cloud, That was a CRM, but it was a categorically different CRM. It wasn't on premise. It was in the cloud. And that difference is something very special because human beings give their attention to things that are different. And ~ then you have a question of, does that create value? Right? If Salesforce had created something that was totally different, but it wasn't actually valuable, that'd be a problem. But That's a good place to be because you're
one step beyond the hardest part, which is getting customers to give you any attention in the first place. So these two ideas, one is being first in the category is really good for being irreplaceable. And then second, if you are new and you're trying to get attention and get customers, creating a new category so that there's a real difference between you and everybody else. is a really great way to get attention and even start a business in the first place.
So there's so many businesses that are starting up in the AI space now and they all sound like they do the same thing. they, a lot of them, I talk to a lot of startups and basically they Mm-hmm. do something cool but they don't solve a problem which comes even before kind of becoming essential. So for a lot of businesses, they hear what you're saying and they'll do something incremental and they'll add a feature. Can you kind of help people to understand
the difference between just adding a feature and add enough of a difference that it could become a new category? Because I think people might underestimate the level of what you're talking about. Uh-huh. Yeah. I think that is, that is one of the reasons why I focus on category because, ~ you know, there's that movie money ball, right? the idea of the Oakland A's whenever, in the nine late nineties or whatever was, Hey, there are, things that are, greatly undervalued in the market.
are qualities that baseball players have. that are greatly undervalued in the market. And if we invest in those qualities that are undervalued, we will actually win more games per dollar that we spend than everybody else. And this was a hugely successful strategy for the Oakland A's and they made a movie about it, of course. So this is a similar thing where in the world of marketing, we all talk about differentiation. We think that we're really differentiating, but there is a pull.
~ it's just a natural pull in our minds and the way that we do things as marketers to actually just differentiate in an incremental way . to say we're easier to use. We're faster. we have more features. and even though as marketers, because we're inside the, the, the, the system, we're inside the company. ~ we believe we're making a very big, different, a point about differentiation, but it's actually really incremental. so when I think about the term categorical differentiation, . .
it really just holds my feet to the fighter saying, no, no, I have to actually believe this is categorically different in order for me to think it's different enough to go market against. And so, there's a number of ways to be categorically different. One is sort of a technological innovation that is so different that it's sort of undeniable. So something like what Salesforce did. . But there's other ways to be categorically different too. If you completely serve and obsess over a certain kind of customer,
that is a really great way to make categorical differentiation too. So for example, LinkedIn, nobody would say LinkedIn is like Facebook or Instagram. It's a different kind of social network because they keyed in on the business And so that's why they don't compete with Facebook, right? They're categorically different, even though they're both social networks. so that's another way to do it. There's a third way that I can think of that's really interesting, which is what I would call solo. And notion does this. So solo basically
says you may be in a rational, the same rational category as other businesses like Koda or Atlassian or whatever. But when you solo, you do every single little thing differently. And if you do every single little thing differently, that vibe and that difference becomes a categorical difference. And so notion is sort of a thing unto itself. It certainly does have competitors, but I think in people's minds, generally, we think, that's a notion. It doesn't really go in another category.
One of the things that really drew me to you, it's really interesting because there's a lot of language out there which we're starting to see a reaction to now, which is use AI to replace your staff. And we've started to see over the past few months these big companies have started to pull back from that because they're getting a backlash, of course, when you threaten everyone's job. I think. You've managed to do this amazing transition where you've implemented AI, but it's actually enhanced your team and
they don't feel threatened. Every time I consult with a company, as soon as the boss leaves or the employees go, make my life easier, but not so much easier that you can replace me. Every single time I always get that meaning and I completely understand Mm-hmm. it because they're so used to that rhetoric. Mm-hmm. And then we see companies replace everyone with AI and then try and rehire everyone once they realize that it's not quite there yet. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I'm really fascinated, but
kind of what was your process when you decided to kind of go in and all AI and how did you manage to keep your team on board instead of feeling Yeah. Yeah. So for backstory, I, um, I think in 2024, when, I think when, I think it was when chat GPT three came out, but, um, uh, it was, it was kind of like, wow, I, I might be out of a job here because it's not hard to look at,
um, chat GPT and March of 2024 and go, okay, I sell writing. I sell, you know, pretty pictures, I sell ideas and this thing is gonna be able to do all of that. And so I just started to think about like, what are the things that I would need to be good at or what would I need to do to be categorically different from artificial intelligence, right? And I landed on a few really simple ideas. One is personal brand. So you might be
able to find a strategist, but... you could, but there's only one place you could get Josh Lowman, the strategist. So personal brand is what gets you that. Also, I started to think about how can we actually use AI so that we were never going to, so we would lessen the amount of human intelligence we use. for things that artificial intelligence could be doing because our customers don't want to pay for human intelligence when artificial intelligence could be doing it, right? So how do I
figure out the mix of artificial and human intelligence in my business? then, so, you know, I spent a couple of years doing a lot of work on this. And I think around... You know, obviously we did all the normal things that you would do with AI. Like we created skills and prompts that and projects that would output . strategy documents or output copy documents to our frameworks and to our, you know, sort of our benchmark for how, for quality and things like that.
So that was relatively easy. But as we got more and more into this, you know, I was really just thinking about. what does knowledge work look like and what does creative work look like in the future and how can we design for that? . But then immediately as I started thinking about that, I realized, okay, if I keep going into AI more and more, my staff is just naturally gonna be worried that I'm gonna be replacing them.
And it did kind of come up a few times. And when it came up, ~ I basically just said, look, I'm worried about losing my job too. We all should be worried about losing our jobs. . and what I want to do is make sure that doesn't happen. and so what I'm going to do, and I had to think about this for a little while, but I basically said, you know, I'm not going to lay anybody off. If we don't lose revenue. Cause that's,
that's like one big risk in all of this, right? It's like. pricing goes down, the business goes down because people are using AI to do what we do. So I basically just said, . look, if we keep revenue, even just like flat line, no one is getting laid off. And that's my promise to you. And sort of, I hope that that gives you the confidence to go all in on AI with me and see what we can do here.
So that was one thing. And then the second thing I did is I basically like, You know, when we had this shift to where the tools with Claude code really changed, . like in December and January, I just kind of went into monk mode on Claude code. . And I took my agency down to the studs and just kind of re remade the whole backend and though how the way we do operations and all of that stuff and where we, where our data is and
everything using Claude code. And when I did that, I. just had that really simple thought of, hey, I should just issue everybody their own agent. So instead of it being like, hey, I'm the business owner and my agents are over here and I've got my staff over here. It's like, why don't we just have it be like one human, one agent? So I'm right in the middle of this rollout. I've rolled out to almost all of our employees. Every employee has Claude code now and
they each have their own agent and we have the ability for the agents to talk to each other on Slack. And I think, you know, hopefully I could tell that my staff is less worried about . it than they were in the past. But of course that doesn't make all the worry go away. But my hope is that that gives them the confidence to say, okay, you know, this is at least it's not a fixed game. have a chance here to grow this business
and you know, save my job in the face of all this changing technology and we can sort . of try to win this thing as a team. One of the big things I've noticed with AI tools is a race to similarity, which I almost think of as a race to the bottom. So I've been testing all these different design tools for the past week and I gave five different tools the same task and they all looked basically the same as each other. The final output
has the same color template, the same fonts, the same style. And almost every AI design website basically looks like each other. AI copywriting pretty much always looks the same. And the way to stand out in a market is differentiation. If everyone else is going one direction, then you want to go the other. And one of the challenges, think, with AI is everyone goes, oh, I can do it with AI. And again, you can. And then they're all sound like each other.
So it's like everyone can get a basic level of copy. Mm-hmm. And if your copy is terrible, then going from terrible to bad is a step up. Mm-hmm. But for everyone who's doing really good stuff, it's a step down. And I've noticed that you now see a lot of AI slop. know, of course, Microsoft is upset. People say micro slop. Like they're so upset by that word, but there's so much content out there. That's a dip in quality. It used to be something like,
your VA write this? And now it's become to chat, GBT, right? This is like the new insult, Uh-huh. Uh-huh. which half the time is true. Um, what do you see as the necessary step forward for companies to input AI, but in a way that doesn't pull them into this vortex of mediocrity and similarness. Yeah. mean, I think, you know, for, in my mind, I first just try to acknowledge that like, there's a certain amount of people and companies, they're going to see this and just think,
I just want to figure out a clever way to use this to make a bunch of money. And I don't really care what, what it is. Right. And then there's other people who are going to be like, I want to actually do something meaningful with this. And so think there's a little bit of like, okay, try to find the people that want to do something meaningful with this. Cause some people are just looking for a clever way to make money.
And some of those people will be successful. That's the sad thing is some people will just be like, yeah, I found this clever way to make money with AI and that worked. But for the folks who want to like meaningfully differentiate. Yeah, you know, I'm trying to think of how to express this, but. First, that, you know, we all have a, an ability to sense when communications are processed and we push against that. And so even though you make a cloud code
website and it looks beautiful and you're like, wow, I can't believe, I can't believe how good that looks. because we've seen it so many other places and we know it's entirely processed. It's not human. doesn't have somebody's heart in it, that's a, we push against that. We won't like that. So I think just naturally the market will require us to differentiate in ways that show that we like put in the work and that we actually have our real feelings in it.
And one thing I always go back to is that these LLMs, don't have feelings. They don't have emotional intelligence. They don't have. They're not irrational. And so the real way to differentiate and to persuade another human being is to show them that you feel something about whatever it is and have them have those feelings too. know, Nike, you if you just take Nike, for example, there's this amazing ad about. the name of it is You Were Born a Daughter. And it was written by this great
copywriter, Janet Champ, a number of years ago. It's just about the story of being a girl, a role, being somebody else too. Being a daughter, being a sister, being a girlfriend, sort of being the object of other people's views. And at a certain point, know, growing up and coming to a place where you're more embodied within yourself and you live for yourself and for your own happiness and the amazing transformation that takes place there. But somehow she got, turned this whole thing around.
it tells a story at the very end. She uses the just do it line. It works perfectly for this story, but you can tell. with every fiber in her being she believes and feels what she wrote. And it's just a really, really successful ad and it makes Nike feel very differentiated in that situation. So I think that's probably the key to all of this, especially in the face of AI is that if we can really put our real feelings out in front in communications.
that is going to be really, it's just always gonna be really powerful. Yeah, I think you're onto something there. Like the biggest problem with AI is the illusion of empathy. And this is why people form attachments with it and go this AI cares about me. It's like, it doesn't it's incapable of feeling it. It's just a random word generator that's very good at guessing the word Mm-hmm. you want to hear the most. And I've definitely noticed that there's two approaches I've experienced
or people that want to use AI for backup house to be more efficient, to organize their data more. And then there's people go, I want AI to answer my emails and do all my social media and talk to my customers. And I feel like the second category that people that are in the most trouble because, when people realize they're talking to an AI, they get upset because they consider it deception. Like if you're on a phone call and you think it's a person,
you realize that's an AI. think something like. Yeah. 87 % of people get a phone call from an AI hang up when they realize it's an AI and the other 13 % didn't realize it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Otherwise they would have hung up too. And I kind of believe maybe this is just me being overly optimistic that we'll kind of lead to a future where we increase the value of in-person communication, handshakes, meeting in person, because then you know you're talking
person and not talking to an AI. So maybe we'll spend less time online, more time in person, kind of a reverse of the Zoom generation. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And it's... The thing that is the most important is your communication with your customers. I think that sometimes it feels inconvenient, but it's the most important thing because they're the ones who will tell you when something is wrong. They're the ones who will tell you earlier in the cycle, this isn't a good idea or I didn't like that ad,
I didn't like that video or this, we don't care about this feature. Because sometimes you'll spend a huge amount of time building, Mm-hmm. I'll spend a ton of time building something and then nobody wants it. So this desire to... Mm-hmm. Replit either to give you efficiency so you can spend more time talking to people or to replace talking to people it's like the two opposite mindsets Mm-hmm. and That's kind of my belief in it I think it aligns with yours Which
is that people want to feel like you care about them people want to feel like you understand their story People want to feel like you can solve their problem. Mm-hmm. This is why? Like I mentioned earlier, there's so many startups that are doing something cool that doesn't solve a problem It's like well people want to solve problems like that's the first thing Mm-hmm. either improve something or take something bad away. And if you're just doing something cool, that's the first bill they cut when they
have to lower their expenses because Mm-hmm. economies go up and down. How can people kind of find the right path to use AI, but to still maintain their voice, but to still have empathy to kind of increase efficiency without sacrificing quality? Mm hmm. Yeah, you know, I use a really simple idea, which is that we all want money and love. And that a business. The cornerstone of a business is money and love. And if we just think about our customers in that way,
you know, they don't want to spend money on having a human do things that would be just as easily the same result would happen if AI or software did it. They don't want to spend 10 times more to have a human do that. So if that is about like getting our back office stuff processed, transactions, anything that is highly functional. they don't want to pay for human intelligence for that. And that's sort of the money and functionality side of things.
And then on the love side of things, I don't know if love is quite the right word, but we want to know that the businesses that we employ and the products that we use are done with love. That the owner of the business and the people behind the business really, really, truly care about solving that problem for us. And that really only comes from a certain kind of intimacy. Being there with them, hearing their problems. saying like, care about this. I really want to solve this.
Like I champion people like you and you can't even just be saying it. You have to kind of get yourself into the head space of, . well, what's it like walking in this customer shoes? And that's bullshit that they're getting screwed in this way. I got to create a product that's going to help them get past this. Like this is not okay. And I think that's the love side of things. think as a business owner, you kind of have to go,
okay, well, what is this? What's the more important idea here? Money or love in all kinds of areas of the business. If somebody just wants to pay their bill or get, get things processed in a very functional way, they don't necessarily want to pay for human beings to do that piece of it. and vice versa on the love side of things. I think that's really good. I think that sometimes we get so excited by a new tool, we kind of don't think of the long-term
implications or how it can affect our communication either between ourselves and our teams or ourselves and our customer base. And this is something as someone in the AI space, I constantly kind of have to push against because I certainly never want to create a tool that causes someone to lose their job. Like that's not the world I want to create where robots have jobs and people don't. And I think that there's a lot of rhetoric that comes from people that do what
I do that's unfortunate and kind of creates this pushback. And I always tell people that if you tell your employees you're building an AI tool and they're training their placement. they're going to sabotage it, which is why most AI projects fail. they're like, how'd you, and then I get the message a months later, how did you know they would sabotage it? I was like, cause I would, if you told me I was getting fired of this AI project work, I would unplug the robot for sure.
Like I, I've been an employee before being a boss and I was a bad employee, took every sick day I got, like I've been at the other end of the spectrum. So I completely understand that. think that it falls into exactly the trap you measured when you stop thinking about love, stop thinking about empathy, stop thinking about the people and just start thinking at dollars. That's when you start to get into dangerous territory. And I think this is really important conversation. Yeah.
So we're just kind of reaching the end of our time. So I'd just love for you to kind of share some final thoughts and also for people that realize they need your help and need to find their category. Where's the best place for them to find some of the things you're writing about online and find the amazing things your agency's doing. Yeah. So final thoughts about AI. I mean, we don't know what's going to happen. I think all of us are kind of scared
whether we are the AI boomers or the AI doomers or some mix of those two things. We have no idea what's going to happen and we know it's going to be a really, really big change. And in the face of that, what we can do is be present in ourselves. And I think when we do that, we realize we want to bring everybody else along too. We don't want to have other people lose out because of this. And it's easy when we get scared like that
to think we got to be reactive, like just look out for ourselves. got to provide for my family and all that. But I think there's enough space for us to look out for each other where we can. And so that's kind of my... That's kind of my take on it. And I I'm able to do that because I'm, I just turned 57 and I'm sort of towards the end, end stage of my career. And I'm not scrapping for money like I was back in the
Um, but I think, so, you know, I have a little bit of privilege to be able to, to think like that, but I think that's what's most interesting in all of this and what we're probably going to have to do, which is just to stay present in ourselves, be able to think, think creatively. Um, and. try to stick together. And then as far as people finding me, come to goldfront.com or I'm on LinkedIn as Josh Lowman. I post on LinkedIn quite often about some,
my thinking on both strategy, brand, and increasingly AI. Amazing. I'll make sure to link to those in the show notes and below the video for those watching on YouTube. Thank you so much for being here today, Josh, for an amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Thank you, it was so nice to be here with you, Jonathan.
