Real talk with Redzone: Mariska Oosthuizen

We’re in an age when open artificial intelligence (AI) can draft an article in mere minutes. That’s caused ripples of concern as humans grapple with the ongoing query of what the rise of AI means for our relevance. Counterintuitively, perhaps, Sanlam believes we’re in an era of hyper human-centricity. Human capabilities are core to creating connections that count. AI brings adeptness; humans bring meaning. And that’s not going to change any time soon.

There are countless moments, every day, when humans use our expertise to find creative solutions, in a way even the best AI cannot emulate (yet). Habib Noorbhai, director of the Biomedical Engineering and Healthcare Technology Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg, recently talked about the human traits of expertise and metacognition. Skill and talent take time and practice. Humans use cumulative learning over our lifetimes to become experts. This evolves into metacognition — awareness of our own sentience and selfhood — which is crucial to critical thinking and problem solving.

It’s also crucial to connection — how we reach out to and interact with others. Humans seek humanness. We want empathy and understanding. We resonate with information that’s grounded in a fundamental human truth, in which we can identify and learn about ourselves. That’s the power of good storytelling. That’s the secret to client-centricity. To find the nugget that connects and moves the audience we’re addressing. Human to human.

This insight has been integral to Sanlam’s client-centric approach, customer experience journey and marketing campaigns. It’s also central to our purpose-led promise to empower all Africans to be financially confident, secure and prosperous. We are deeply committed to fostering greater financial inclusion across the continent. AI is one of the tools we use to do this at scale. AI collates information. But it takes humanness to recognise a shared problem and solve it.

For example, we know South Africans struggle to save, and credit cards make us even less connected with what money really means. So, in 2014, we gave our One Rand Man his salary in R1 coins to feel the tangible weight of every rand he spent.

We also know that all humans get swept up in social signalling and aspirations, sometimes at the expense of our future financial fitness. So, in 2016, we asked Pearl Thusi and Cassper Nyovest, two of the continent’s most influential celebrities, to be Conspicuous Savers and to interrogate their spending behaviours and long-term saving goals.

Most recently our LI:FE of Confidence campaign launched in the Metaverse — a first for South Africa. Once again, it is grounded in human truth. Humans tend to discount the future and we favour short-term gains over long-term success — a phenomenon known as short-termism or presence bias. This is a result of our brain’s inability to allow us to relate to future versions of ourselves. In fact, when asked to imagine a future version of oneself, the synaptic activity in the brain is the same as when we imagine a stranger.

This is an added barrier to saving — why would people save money for a self they can’t connect with? We had to make the reality of ageing more tangible.

So we created a virtual influencer named Zesande. While virtual influencers are not new, what makes Zesande special is that she experiences her whole life in just one day. Over the course of 24 hours, Zesande moves through the different life stages, from starting her career to entering retirement. Through Zesande’s existence and story, we give South Africans the opportunity to imagine their future selves, prompting them to think about their financial lives differently.

It takes human creativity to make these leaps to link short-term bias to an avatar that lives her full life in 24-hours. While AI can be fed the inputs that it needs to generate an article or collate information, it cannot make these connections. And it cannot problem create in the ways that humans can.

There’s no doubt that AI is an amazing tool that frees humans to focus on what we’re good at – being human, making connections, being creative and finding innovative solves to the world’s biggest problems. So as long as we keep talking to other humans in a human way our roles are safe! AI is a way to amplify connection. It is the medium for the message; it’s never the message itself.

Mariska Oosthuizen is chief marketing officer at Sanlam