There is a comfortable story going around that AI is about to replace teachers, coaches, and creators. The data says close to the opposite, and the most interesting part is who the data comes from.
At SXSW 2026 I sat on a Teachable panel about how creators teach. You can read my full notes from that stage here. One number from their student survey stopped the room. As Teachable's Olivia Owens put it:
Only 4 percent of students say they are replacing paid courses with AI entirely. And that group is almost entirely people who use AI every single day.
Read that twice. It is not the AI skeptics who still pay for human made courses. It is the power users. The people who know exactly what a model can do are the ones least willing to let it replace a real teacher.
Why fluency makes humans more valuable, not less
This tracks with everything I have learned in seventeen years of making content. My audience can search any ingredient. They can ask a chatbot to explain niacinamide at four reading levels. They still show up for me, because what they are buying is not information. Information is free and infinite now. What they pay for is trust, a point of view, and someone who has been wrong in public and corrected herself.
When a tool can produce endless competent answers, competent answers stop being scarce. The scarce thing becomes judgment, taste, and a human who is accountable to you. That is exactly what a course buyer is really purchasing, and it is why the heaviest AI users are the least likely to cut a human out of their learning.
What this means for a beauty brand
The lesson for brands is the same one creators are living. As AI makes content cheaper and more plentiful, another explainer video is worth a little less every month. A human your customer actually believes is worth more. The brands that win the next few years will not be the ones generating the most content. They will be the ones who use AI to clear the busywork so their real people can spend more time where trust is built.
So the smart move is not to automate faster than your competitors. It is to decide where the human stays, and protect that. Use AI for the calendar, the first draft, the data pull. Keep a person on the part your customer came for.
If you are trying to map where a real human belongs in your funnel as everything else automates, that is exactly the work I love doing.
