Half Human Half Machine (HH/HM) is a New York AI search visibility and brand strategy agency. But the origin story really begins much earlier. Before founding HH/HM, I honed my intuition in fashion and branding, first as a trend forecaster. Fashion taught me how to read cultural signals before they fully surfaced. Fashion really is a reflection of now—a reflection of the moment, of culture, art, the economy and the people around us. It provokes conversation, an argument, and makes us question. Fashion is, in many ways, a living conversation—a time capsule of emotion and evolution That same way of reading culture eventually carried into my next chapter. Later, as a serial entrepreneur launching DTC brands, I learned to read a different kind of signal: numbers. Conversion, behavior, retention, what people bought, what they ignored, what brought them back. Underneath those numbers, I was often looking for the same thing I had looked for in culture: the emotion beneath the behavior. What makes someone desire something? What creates belonging? Why does one brand become part of someone’s identity while another remains simply a product? The signal I’m reading now is this: Search is becoming conversational, and most brands are not yet built for that world. On May 19, 2026, Google described its new AI-powered Search box as its biggest upgrade in more than 25 years, since its inception. Search can increasingly interpret intent, carry context through follow-up questions, and move toward agents that can research and act for us. I don’t believe ecommerce—or web search itself—will look the way it does today five years from now. Most of our digital infrastructure was designed for the previous paradigm: indexes, keywords, backlinks, ranked pages and clicks. The emerging system is increasingly built around understanding. And I think commerce will follow. Imagine an ecommerce experience that feels less like searching through a digital catalogue and more like walking into a wonderful store where the world’s best personal shopper already knows you. It knows what you bought six months ago, what you were looking at last week, what fits your life, what you usually reject, what you might need now—and can have a conversation with you in real time. The paradox is that the more intelligent machines become, the more important it becomes for a brand to refine its identity—who it is and what it stands for. That is where HH/HM is different.

"We don’t treat AI visibility as simply an SEO update. We treat it as an identity-mapping problem." We developed Contextual Intelligence Mapping™ and our Brand OS framework—Culture Code, Design Code and Systems Code—so that the human meaning of a brand and its machine-readable representation are not developed in separate rooms. Culture Code asks: What do you mean? What do you believe? What world are you inviting people into? Design Code asks: How does that meaning become recognizable and felt? Systems Code asks: Can machines understand it, retrieve it, connect it and confidently act on it? The goal is one coherent identity—legible to humans and machines alike. Coming from fashion, I learned to read emotion before it became a trend.

Same instinct. New terrain.

Right now, almost entirely through relationships, referrals and people who already know my work. We are a very new company, so in many ways I’m still watching the market respond in real time. But I know where I want the business to come from. I want to work with founders and brand leaders who understand that this transition isn’t simply about squeezing another few percentage points out of an optimization system. For years, much of marketing has steadily become MarTech. We became extraordinarily good at workflows, funnels, targeting, attribution and optimization. Legacy agencies remain obsessed with ranking—even as we move deeper into a zero-click world. Those capabilities matter. But I think optimization itself will become increasingly automated. And when everyone has access to increasingly similar optimization machinery, difference moves somewhere else. It moves back to imagination. To point of view. To story. To identity, taste, trust and belonging. We spent the peak-algorithm era learning how to create things that generated views. But people are exhausted. They are living with algorithmic feeds, infinite synthetic content, surveillance, digital doxxing and relentless attempts to capture their attention. I think one of the reactions to that world will be a renewed hunger for things that feel real. People will look for communities. Tribes. Trusted voices. Brands with values. People whose taste means something. Signals that another human being has actually exercised judgment. So, strangely, my thesis about an increasingly machine-mediated future is deeply human: the more automated the infrastructure becomes, the more valuable genuine human distinction becomes. That’s the kind of company I want finding us.

I have happily handed AI enormous amounts of organization, research, synthesis and repetitive work. I want machines doing the boring things. Organizing information. Finding patterns across large amounts of material. First-pass research. Repetitive production. Automating workflows. The endless digital equivalent of pixel pushing. What I tried to hand over—and eventually took back—was my writing. I spent a great deal of time trying to train AI to write in my voice. It could imitate certain characteristics, but something kept disappearing. AI writing felt too compressed, too resolved, and sometimes strangely certain about pre-established ideas that weren’t relevant to my context. Facts are not understanding; they inform our assumptions, but assumptions are an exploration of ideas. And I realized that, for me, writing isn’t merely the output of thinking. Writing is how I think. So I went back to pen and paper. I wander. I make connections. I contradict myself. I circle sentences. I follow an instinct that initially makes no sense. Somewhere in that mess, a perspective emerges. Then I bring AI back in—to research, challenge, organize, edit or clean up. I think that distinction matters. I want AI to extend my intelligence. I don’t want it deciding what I think. Intuition, perspective, taste and discernment are still profoundly human territory.

We are five days old. 🙂 So ask me again in six months. But there is something wonderfully recursive about launching an AI visibility company right now: we are becoming our own experiment. We can watch, in real time, how a new brand becomes understood by Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity; which sources influence that understanding; which ideas travel; which language becomes associated with us; and eventually whether those systems begin recommending us. So I don’t have an impressive attribution chart to show you yet. I have something more interesting:

– a live laboratory.

First: build a point of view. A thought process is becoming more valuable, not less. Execution will continue to be automated. Optimization will continue to be automated. Much of what currently looks like specialist technical expertise will eventually become infrastructure. Don’t resist that change. Build the infrastructure. Automate the repetitive work. Structure your information. Make your organization machine-readable. Let AI remove the administrative and production work that has been sitting between creative people and their best ideas. But don’t confuse efficiency with imagination. The purpose of better machinery should be to give human beings more room to be human. So I would tell people working in marketing, branding and design to spend as much time studying humanity as they spend studying AI. Read literature. Study art. Study psychology and anthropology. Study the great old advertising case studies. Study subcultures. Study desire. Pay attention to what makes people laugh, fall in love, rebel, imitate each other, form groups, change their minds and assign meaning to completely irrational things. Learn the technology, absolutely. But don’t allow the technology to flatten your curiosity about people. And I would keep three thoughts from three masters somewhere close to my desk: “Marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world, it’s a very noisy world.” — Steve Jobs, Co-founder, Apple “Learning to tell a story is incredibly important because that’s how the money works. The money flows as a function of the stories.” — Don Valentine, Founder, Sequoia Capital “You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people; design is made for people.” — Dieter Rams, former Head of Design, Braun Those ideas were true before AI.

I suspect they will matter even more because of it.