It’s Time Marketers Ditch the Term “User”

It is 2026. Your refrigerator can suggest dinner. Your watch knows you slept badly. An AI assistant can research a product, compare prices and make a purchase before you have finished deciding whether you even want it.

Somewhere, a marketing dashboard records all of this as user activity.

That word, user, has followed technology for decades. It once described someone operating a computer, back when doing so was a distinct enough activity to warrant its own label. Today, nearly everyone encounters digital technology constantly, often without consciously “using” anything at all.
We walk through sensor-filled stores. We speak to cars. Algorithms decide which headlines, products and people enter our field of vision. Software operates quietly around us. And now, AI agents increasingly interact with digital products on our behalf.

In that world, what exactly is a user?

Is it the person who asked an AI assistant to find a birthday gift? The assistant that searched for it? The recipient who opened it? The family member who later returned it? The algorithm that decided which brands deserved consideration?

User was never an especially warm word. Now, it is not even a particularly precise one.

The Problem Is Bigger Than Vocabulary

This is not an argument for placing the word user in a ceremonial coffin and banning it from every meeting. It remains useful in certain contexts. The problem begins when the term shapes the way we think.

A user uses. They click, scroll, subscribe, convert, abandon and return. They move through a journey we have thoughtfully diagrammed in a collection of rectangles and arrows.
A person does considerably more.

A person arrives distracted. They misunderstand instructions. They ask a friend for advice. They feel anxious entering medical information. They abandon a purchase because their child starts crying. They may never click the advertisement that changed their opinion. They may purchase from a physical store after weeks of online research.

A dashboard sees fragmented events. A person experiences one continuous relationship.

When we think only in terms of users, we tend to focus on the parts of that relationship a digital experience can observe and measure. We optimize the visible behaviors because they are available, measurable and reassuringly numerical.

People do not become less important simply because parts of their experience are difficult to measure.

We Have Become Very Good at Optimizing

Modern marketing technology can test an extraordinary number of variables. We can generate hundreds of headlines, personalize pages for narrow audience segments and adjust campaigns before lunch. AI can analyze behavior, predict intent and build creative variations faster than any human team could review them.

This is genuinely powerful. It also means we can become extraordinarily efficient at improving the wrong thing.

A higher click-through rate does not necessarily mean someone likes the brand. A completed form does not prove the process felt respectful. More time on a page might indicate engagement — or confusion. A conversion may conceal frustration, regret or simply the absence of a better option.

Even personalization can become strangely impersonal. A brand might know that someone viewed a pair of shoes three times without knowing why they did not buy them in the end. The result is often not empathy, but pursuit - with the same shoes appearing across the internet like a private investigator with an unusually generous media budget.

When optimization becomes the goal rather than the tool, people are reduced to behaviors we can influence. We ask how to make them click instead of whether the experience deserves their attention.

The system may call that performance. The person may call it annoying.

AI Makes the Distinction More Important

Generative AI has lowered the cost of producing almost everything marketers make: copy, images, videos, emails, landing pages, product recommendations and campaign variations.
The result is an abundance of adequate (and often inadequate) content.

Brands can now create more messages for more segments across more channels with less effort. But the person on the receiving end does not experience our operational efficiency. They experience another email, another ad, another notification and another company insisting it understands them.

At the same time, AI is changing who - or what - interacts with brands. An automated agent may visit a website, evaluate a product and summarize its findings without sending a human to the page at all. The person may encounter only the final recommendation.

Designing for this future will require structured information, accessible systems and experiences that machines can interpret. But it will also require something machines cannot manufacture through volume alone: a reason for people to care.

Machines may navigate the interface. People still live with the consequences.

The Experience Is Larger Than the Screen

For years, organizations have invested heavily in removing friction near conversion. That work still matters. A checkout should be clear. A form should be usable. An app should be intuitive. But no one has ever developed deep brand loyalty because a password-reset process was needlessly confusing.

An easy checkout cannot rescue an indifferent brand experience.

People encounter brands through packaging, search, customer support, physical spaces, reviews, and conversations they were never meant to hear. They notice whether an advertisement is entertaining or intrusive. They remember whether a company was helpful when something went wrong. They recognize when accessibility was considered from the beginning rather than added after launch.

They also encounter absence. A brand communicates something when its captions are inaccurate, its packaging is impossible to open, or its automated support system refuses to acknowledge a problem outside the approved menu.

None of these moments exist in isolation. Together, they form the brand.

That is why human-centered work asks for more than functionality. It asks what the experience demands from people — and what it gives them in return.

People Are Not Friction to Be Removed

Marketers often describe friction as if it were universally harmful. Sometimes, it is. Hidden fees, inaccessible interfaces and confusing instructions create friction without creating value.

But people may want time to understand a medical decision. They may want to compare financial products carefully. They may appreciate a confirmation step before deleting years of work. They may enjoy exploring a product rather than being rushed toward a purchase.

The fastest journey is not always the most human one.

The same is true of attention. Capturing attention is easy if interruption, anxiety and manipulation are acceptable. Earning attention is harder. It requires creating something useful, moving, surprising or genuinely enjoyable.

That distinction matters because people are increasingly surrounded by systems engineered to provoke immediate reactions. A human-centered brand should not merely ask whether it can trigger another behavior. It should ask whether doing so improves the person’s experience.

Better Words Create Better Questions

Language does not automatically fix strategy, but it influences which questions feel natural.

Call someone a user, and we might ask:

• Did they complete the task?
• Where did they abandon the funnel?
• Which message produced the click?

Call them a person, and additional questions appear:

• What were they trying to accomplish beyond the task on the screen?
• What might they be feeling at this moment?
• Could this experience exclude or embarrass someone?
• Does our personalization feel helpful or invasive?
• Does this interaction build trust?

The first set of questions improves interfaces. The second can improve relationships.

We need both.

Human-Centered Does Not Mean Anti-Technology

Putting people first does not require rejecting automation, analytics or AI. It means remembering what those systems are for.

Use AI to make information easier to understand. Use personalization to reduce irrelevant noise. Use automation to remove repetitive work and accelerate support. Use behavioral data to identify where people struggle. Use experimentation to create more useful, inclusive and engaging experiences.

But give people control. Make automated decisions understandable. Provide a way to reach another human when the system fails. Collect less data when less will do. Design for people with different abilities, circumstances, languages and levels of technical confidence.

Most importantly, do not confuse knowing more about someone with understanding them.

A model can predict behavior without recognizing dignity. A platform can identify intent without comprehending context. A dashboard can measure an action without knowing whether the experience was good.

That judgment remains ours.

Beyond the User

At Nebo, human-centered thinking is not a layer added after the strategy has been approved. It is the standard by which the strategy should be judged.

That means considering the entire experience, not only the measurable portion. It means treating accessibility as part of the idea, not a compliance exercise. It means creating advertising worthy of attention rather than buying enough impressions to overcome indifference. It means remembering that every session, conversion, and audience segment represents people with lives that continue beyond our interface.

There will still be occasions when we say user. Old habits survive, and sometimes the word is simply practical. The objective is not linguistic perfection.

The objective is to notice when abstraction becomes the problem.

In the years ahead, the entity visiting a brand experience may be a person, an AI agent, or some combination of the two. Technology will continue to complicate the definition of a user — that only makes our responsibility clearer.

Design for behavior, but consider emotion.

Measure outcomes, but examine consequences.

Build for machines when necessary, but remain accountable to humans.

A human being is not a traffic source, a persona, a conversion or a collection of predicted preferences. A human being is not the final step in our funnel.

A human is the reason the experience exists.