Staying human: How AI is rewiring our minds - and our industry

This month, we opened Base.Camp Lisbon with an important acknowledgement. In the face of uncertainty surrounding AI-driven transformations impacting the publishing and adtech industries, leaders are left trying to balance revenue optimization in the present, with preparing for an opaque but rapidly shifting future.

Rob stressed that while AI dominates the conversation, the industry’s work today still matters, with attendees in Lisbon serving as ‘bridge builders’ between today’s realities and tomorrow’s possibilities.

The collaborative, problem-solving culture of the group, encouraging one another to speak openly and ask questions in a publisher-led environment, set the tone for not one but two keynote sessions. Let’s dig in.

“Brand Darwinism” - how brands and publishers have been undermined over time

Brand strategist Eugene Healey began his keynote session by arguing that publishing’s challenges are not just technological, but stem from a long-running cultural and economic shift driven by big tech. He described three major ‘fronts’ where platforms have reshaped the landscape:

1. Social Media: Where publishers built audiences on ‘rented land’, losing direct relationships with readers. Platforms penalized outbound links, prompting content to live natively, and algorithmic discovery eroded the meaning of followers.
2. Platformization: With content becoming optimized for algorithms rather than substance, brands (and even human faces - especially in the beauty industry) have grown increasingly homogenized and the internet as a whole has shifted from creative diversity to standardized, efficiency-driven sameness.
3. AI: By making creation instant and authorship ambiguous, AI accelerates frictionless consumption and deepens distrust. Many audiences now assume everything is fake until proven real.

So what does all this mean for publishers? Today, they’re not just fighting market forces, but also a worldview that treats human interaction and friction as inefficiencies. The solution, according to Eugene, is to de-position that worldview.

The future for publisher brands: Four possibilities

Eugene went on to map out four potential strategic directions:

1. Brand as an Ensemble As trust in institutions diminishes, journalists instead become trusted individual voices, similar to creators or influencers. Publishers such as Wired or Puck News make this happen by creating systems that reward, develop and protect these individuals, (along the lines of shared revenue models, talent development, new contract structures, co-branding and long-term pathways like book deals)
2. Brand as a Clubhouse A community model, based on private communities across social media platforms (think Telegram, Facebook groups, Reddit, Substack). Paid-for membership is centered around common interests tied to the media brand, in which people organize meetups, share job leads, host events, and build connections.
3. Brand as a Tastemaker - The argument is that since AI produces information but lacks taste, intent or emotional intelligence, publishers (such as Dazed, NYT) can win by cultivating cultural authority - and monetizing taste through creative services.
4. Brand as an Intelligence Network - Publishers can add what AI-driven abundance lacks: context. Drawing on models like Ground News, which labels political bias and aggregates stories, Eugene argued that publishers can build similar contextual layers - political, aesthetic, moral, geographic - to help people understand rather than merely consume information.

What will publishing look like in 2034?

The AI vs human story continued with our second keynote, which again focused on how AI is reshaping digital publishing and how the industry should react. When Rob sat down with Kunal Gupta - entrepreneur, author of 2034: How AI Changed Humanity Forever, and founder of the AI-native newsletter Pivot 5 - the conversation became less about technology, and more about what it means to work, create, and stay human in an AI-accelerated world.

Kunal’s journey into AI didn’t begin in a boardroom, but while chatting on a hike in Sintra in 2022, months before ChatGPT launched. That conversation sparked a question he would eventually pose to more than 250 people across academia, government, corporate, and startup circles: What will AI change in our world? Their answers, ranging from optimism to skepticism, became the foundation of his book.

A focus on empowerment

AI has shifted what a single individual can build, learn, or launch without relying on large teams or specialized training. But that empowerment requires a mindset shift: using AI not to do the things we already know how to do, but to explore what we don’t. That requires curiosity, humility, and a willingness to fail: traits that tend to erode as careers mature.

Kunal was clear about the challenges ahead: the next year or two will be full of false starts with tools disappearing, startups folding, and workflows breaking. But he sees this turbulence as part of learning to work differently. He illustrated this through an everyday example: organizing a photobooth for a 70th birthday party on a boat in rural Australia. He asked an AI agent for local vendors, their websites, and email addresses - compiled with commas for quick outreach. The inquiry email was written by the agent too. Three proposals arrived within an hour. Done. AI didn’t just speed up the task, it removed the mental friction that might have stopped it from happening at all.

For publishers and content creators, his message was clear: trust becomes the true differentiator. In a world where AI intermediates discovery, users will gravitate toward voices and brands whose judgment they trust. And trust isn't static. It is built through curation, credibility, listening, and human connection.

Across both sessions, one message emerged: The future of publishing, and perhaps of work overall, belongs to those who pair AI’s capabilities with distinctly human strengths, such as curiosity, judgment, storytelling, trust, and connection. Approached in this way, AI is expanding the human journey rather than replacing it. As such, the industry must lean into these strengths, rethink scale-driven models, and build deeper relationships with those audiences who would miss them if they disappeared.