(6:13 Q&A Video) “Why Voice of Customer is AI’s Missing Context”

In this 6:13 video, Kari Hanson compares today’s AI to early Wikipedia. She explains how models trained on generic data push every company toward the same messages. She also argues that context is king and that the voice of the customer provides that context, showing how marketing must connect buyer, user, and executive perspectives to train AI intelligently.

AI promised to help B2B teams move faster, personalize at scale, and unlock new insights. In reality, many leaders are discovering that their content now sounds exactly like everyone else. Buyers see similar emails, similar posts, and similar offers from vendors who all claim to be different. The problem is not the technology itself. It is the lack of context that goes into the systems. Models trained only on public data will naturally return similar answers for everyone.

Kari Hanson, Chief Marketing Officer at Robin, argues that if leaders want true differentiation, they must feed AI something the rest of the market does not have. That something is the real, unfiltered voice of their customers. When companies build systems to collect and connect this voice, they gain the context that turns AI from a source of noise into a driver of clarity, trust, and growth.

“AI misses the context, and the context is king. I am a huge believer in the voice of the customer. When you start having those conversations, and you can train your AI based on what your customers are saying, you can add that context. Suddenly, that AI becomes very powerful, and it has a lot of potential for the go-to-market teams in many ways.” – Kari Hanson

To learn more, watch the 6:13 video or read the article below.

To catch the full interview with Kari on “From Chaos to Clarity: Creating Predictable Revenue Systems,” CLICK HERE.

Article: “Why Voice of Customer is AI’s Missing Context”

This article is based on an interview with Kari Hanson, Chief Marketing Officer at Robin

AI Without Context Turns Insight Into Noise

Kari compares today’s generic AI to early Wikipedia. When everyone could edit entries, the so-called wisdom of the crowd quickly turned into confusion. No one could be sure which information to trust. The same dynamic is now visible in AI-generated content. If every company uses the same broad prompts on the same broad data, they should expect to see the same broad output. Buyers, who are already skeptical, learn to tune it out.

Kari explains exactly how this happens. “You could say, here is what my ICP is. Here is their title, here is their company. Suddenly, the AI tells you the content you could produce. But spoiler alert, it is telling everyone of your competitors the exact same thing.” The result is a flood of look-alike messaging that erodes trust instead of building it. AI, by itself, does not know what makes one company’s point of view distinct or why a specific customer chooses them over alternatives. Without deeper context, the technology only amplifies sameness.

Voice Of The Customer As The Missing Ingredient

The missing piece is not a smarter prompt. It is deeper, structured customer insight. “AI misses the context, and the context is king. I am a huge believer in the voice of the customer.” Kari stresses that every department already talks to customers, but each one does it through its own lens. Product focuses on features and roadmap. Customer success focuses on adoption and health. Sales focuses on deals and objections. None of these conversations, on their own, represents the whole story.

Marketing’s job is to stitch those lenses together so the company can see what is really happening. That means asking bigger questions that cut across departments. When answers to those questions are captured, organized, and connected, they form a unique data set that no competitor shares. Feeding that context into AI turns generic summaries into reflections of how real customers think and talk.

Turning Customer Context Into Differentiated Growth

Once companies treat the voice of the customer as a strategic asset, AI can finally support the differentiation they want. Instead of training models only on public content and internal documents, teams can add call transcripts, interview notes, win-loss insights, and feedback from customers who churned or lost. The goal is not to spy on individual conversations. It is to surface patterns that explain why people buy, stay, or leave. These patterns then guide messaging, content, and product decisions.

When AI is trained on this foundation, the outputs begin to sound less like an industry summary and more like the language buyers actually use. Content reflects real priorities and objections, not generic themes. Sales and marketing teams can create messages that feel specific and relevant rather than interchangeable. Over time, this builds a brand that stands apart in a market full of noise. Kari’s core point is simple. AI delivers its real value only when it is powered by a strong voice-of-customer program that provides the context it cannot find on its own.

Conclusion

AI will not fix weak positioning or shallow customer understanding. Without context, it simply produces more of the duplicate content that already crowds buyers’ feeds and inboxes. Kari Hanson’s perspective offers a clear alternative. Treat the voice of the customer as the unique ingredient that turns AI from a commodity into a competitive advantage. Build systems that connect every lens on the customer, then train models on that richer view. When companies do this, they move beyond generic output and toward differentiated growth that reflects what their customers truly value, fear, and need.

ELEVATING CONTENT MARKETING STANDARDS RAISES A CRUCIAL QUESTION:
Why shouldn’t the very act of creating thought leadership content also spark new conversations with in-pipeline deals, top prospects, and high-priority customers for revenue expansion? Or serve as the cornerstone for learning and applying voice-of-customer strategies? That’s the power of ABM Podcasting—engaging B2B buyers and customers in meaningful conversations that uncover essential go-to-market insights, support long sales cycles, reinforce your market perspective, build peer-level trust, and dismantle objections that kill deals.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.

Steven MacDonald

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.