DESIGNING FOR HUMANS. EXPLAINING FOR MACHINES.

Meet Derek.

Derek is short for Digital Entity Reviewing Every Keyword, a name someone in a meeting was clearly quite proud of, and which nobody has said in full since. Derek is a large language model, currently reading your website at 3am on behalf of someone who will never know his name, acronym or otherwise. He has no coffee, no deadline pressure, and no patience for the phrase “unlocking tomorrow’s possibilities, today.” He has read your homepage twice. He is no closer to knowing what you sell.

This is happening more than you’d think. Somewhere, right now, a Derek is trawling a vendor’s website trying to answer perfectly reasonable questions: What does this company do? Who is it for? Does it integrate with Salesforce? Is there a case study, or just a stock photo of four people laughing at a laptop?

Derek doesn’t laugh at laptops. Derek doesn’t laugh at anything.

Derek just leaves.

For years, websites were built for two audiences: humans, who wanted photos and feelings, and Google, who wanted keywords and a sitemap. Everyone knew the rules. It was, relatively speaking, a simpler time.

Now there’s a third guest. Not the sentient-computer-volcano-lair variety. More the tireless intern who reads ten thousand pages before your first coffee and reports back with disturbing efficiency. Buyers are sending Derek ahead of themselves – to research, compare, shortlist, and quietly judge – before a human ever picks up the phone.

Which means your website now has a second job. It has to make sense to Derek, too.

B2B copywriting has spent a decade perfecting the art of saying very little, at length, with total confidence. Take a completely ordinary sentence, of the sort found on approximately a thousand homepages this morning:

“We help ambitious organisations reach their full potential through intelligent transformation.”

Reach it how, exactly? By Uber? On foot? Nobody who has ever spoken this sentence aloud has been understood by another human being, and Derek fares no better. He can’t infer meaning from vague confidence. He needs actual information – the way the rest of us secretly did too, if we're honest about it.

Branding has always been about how you want to be seen. That hasn’t changed. What’s new is that your brand also has to explain itself clearly enough for something with no decernment, sense of humour or capacity for charm to repeat it accurately to somebody else.

Old brand thinking asked: how do we want people to feel about us?

New brand thinking has to also ask: could a machine explain, correctly, in one sentence, what we actually do?

Most businesses have a confident answer to the first question and no answer at all to the second.

Ask Derek to find “a network security provider for a mid-sized New Zealand business with a strong local support team,” and a well-structured website hands him exactly that. A poorly structured one hands him a sentence like this instead, and Derek quietly adds it to a small private glossary of phrases he no longer bothers translating. He simply notes them and moves on, the way you’d note a pothole.

“Unlocking tomorrow’s possibilities, today.” Unlocked how, precisely? With what key? Derek pictures a small ceremonial padlock on the future and nobody who can find the key. He has checked. There is no key.

“Future-proofing your business.” Implies the future is a weather event you can seal the windows against. It is not. It is Tuesday, then it is Wednesday. Nothing has been proofed.

“Seamless, end-to-end solutions.” No seams have been located. Derek has looked. He suspects, privately, that this means the company simply hasn’t described what it does in enough detail for a seam to become visible.

“Disrupting the space.” Which space? A room? An industry? The checkout queue at PAK’nSAVE? Disruption, on inspection, usually turns out to mean “we made an app.”

None of these phrases are lies, exactly. They’re just sentences built to survive contact with absolutely nobody – pleasant, confident, and completely unable to tell Derek what you actually do.

It’s tempting to file this under “technical.” It isn’t. It’s a communication problem wearing an AI costume. And the fix isn’t complicated, which is somehow the most annoying part: the things Derek values are the same things humans have always wanted and rarely gotten – clarity, evidence, plain language, and sentences that end somewhere.

Compare:

“Intelligent Solutions for Modern Enterprises.” Sounds important. Means nothing.

“Managed Network and Security Services for Mid-Sized Businesses.” Slightly less glamorous. Immediately useful, to a human and to Derek alike.

The goal was never to remove personality. It’s to remove the fog you’d been mistaking for it.