What is Share of Life and why is it changing how we measure brands?
I’ve spent four years writing my next book. Or, perhaps more accurately, I’ve spent four years trying to figure out which book truly deserves to be written.
During this time, I’ve written hundreds of pages and dedicated many more hours to reading, researching, conversing, traveling, giving lectures, and observing how the world is changing. I’ve even completed seven different versions of the same project. Some were born when the metaverse seemed destined to redefine our relationship with technology. Others took shape when artificial intelligence began to occupy the center of virtually every conversation.
Each one responded to the moment we were living in, and precisely for that reason, none of them completely convinced me.
Far from feeling that this time was a failure, I now see it as one of the most valuable lessons of this entire process. Because writing a book isn’t just about developing an idea, but about finding a framework that remains relevant even after the circumstances that inspired it have changed. Technologies evolve at an extraordinary pace; truly important questions tend to evolve much more slowly.
It was precisely while reviewing that journey that I discovered something that, until now, I had never clearly formulated.
There’s no such thing as three without four.
For a long time, I thought that BrandOffOn, HumanOffOn, and TOTEM responded to different conversations. The first explored how the boundaries between online and offline were disappearing ; the second stemmed from a concern that remains fully relevant today—to what extent the internet was changing the way we think, learn, relate, and understand each other; while TOTEM proposed a reflection on trust and the ability of some organizations to transform customers into believers in an era marked by a profound crisis of credibility.
Over time I have come to understand that those were never the true themes of my books.
They were, rather, the scenarios from which he tried to observe the same conversation.
Technology was always changing. Platforms, devices, business models, and tools were all changing. However, one question remained constant, somehow running through everything I wrote without me being fully aware of it.
A philosophical, historical framework.
Technologies change at an extraordinary pace, but the truly important questions tend to stay with us for much longer. Heraclitus understood centuries ago that reality is in constant motion; what he perhaps couldn’t have anticipated was the speed with which that motion is now changing the way we live, work, learn, and relate to one another.
Every technological revolution comes with a promise. It offers us proximity, efficiency, access to knowledge, the elimination of barriers, time savings, and expanded capabilities. Many of these promises are fulfilled and positively transform our lives. However, technological development alone never answers the question of meaning.
Aristotle already linked a full life with character, virtue, and purpose ; more than two thousand years later, we continue to discover that having more abilities does not necessarily determine what we should do with them.
The internet transformed our relationship with information and knowledge. Social media altered identity, recognition, and our sense of belonging. Hyperconnectivity modified our attention span and our relationship with time. The pandemic redefined proximity, trust, organizational culture, and the meaning of work. Today, artificial intelligence introduces a different kind of tension, because it is beginning to intervene in the creation of words, images, ideas, narratives, and expressions that we have long associated with our individuality.
Darwin taught us that adaptability is crucial for survival. However, adapting doesn’t mean blindly accepting everything that comes along. It also involves identifying what needs to evolve, what deserves to be strengthened, and what forms part of our deepest identity. The challenge of our time is to incorporate the possibilities of artificial intelligence without diluting our own voice, responsibility, judgment, creativity, and confidence.
Borges imagined infinite libraries long before we could access, from a screen, a virtually unfathomable amount of information. Today, the problem is no longer just access. The difficulty lies in finding relevance, discernment, and meaning within this abundance. Something similar happens with creation: when producing texts, images, and content becomes easy, the value of that which expresses a unique perspective and manages to establish a genuine connection with others increases.
What happens to a human being when the environment in which they live changes?
Today, artificial intelligence is once again shifting the center of gravity of that conversation. Not only because it automates processes or increases productivity, but because, for the first time, it is beginning to intervene in a territory that for centuries we have considered essentially human. It no longer simply facilitates communication; it participates in the creation of words, images, stories, ideas, and conversations. It doesn’t just modify the channel. It begins to engage with the very content of our intelligence, our creativity, and our expression.
And perhaps that’s where the real novelty appears.
Not because artificial intelligence represents the most sophisticated technology we have ever known, but because it is the first capable of putting under strain what I have been trying to understand for more than fifteen years: authenticity, trust, identity, creativity, one’s own voice and the ability to build meaningful relationships.
That intuition led me to formulate an idea that, the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.
I have always written about people.
Branding has been the place from which I have tried to observe how each technological advance forces human beings to rediscover themselves and how brands reveal, before almost any other discipline, what part of that humanity we are preserving and what part we are putting at risk.
That’s one of the reasons why brands have always fascinated me. Not only because they are strategic assets for organizations, but because they constitute an extraordinary cultural expression. They reflect what a society admires, what it fears, what it is beginning to lose, and what it needs to recover. They speak of trust before it appears in the statistics; they speak of identity before the debate makes the headlines; they speak of belonging before we are fully aware of how much we need it.
Perhaps that’s why I’m starting to think that artificial intelligence isn’t the topic of my next book.
It simply represents the new scenario.
The conversation remains the same.
Every time a new technology promises to solve something profoundly human, it also forces us to ask ourselves what part of our humanity is strained, altered, or threatened, and what deserves to be preserved so that progress does not end up distancing us from what it was precisely intended to improve.
I don’t have a degree yet.
I also don’t know if this will ultimately be the conversation that structures the book.
What I am beginning to suspect is that I have been writing about the same idea for more than fifteen years without having yet found the concept capable of naming it.
And perhaps the time has come to stop looking for that answer only in my notes and start looking for it in conversation as well.
I would like to know your opinion.
Do you think this is a conversation that deserves a book?
Which dimension of humanity do you think is being most transformed by technology?
What should we preserve, cultivate, or recover in the coming years?
I read you with great interest.
Because I’m increasingly convinced that the true revolution of artificial intelligence won’t just be about showing us what machines are capable of, but about forcing us to rediscover what it means to remain human. And it’s highly likely that, in retrospect, technology has never been the real issue of these years. It has always been the mirror through which we try to better understand ourselves.
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