Gilbert Ryle once offered a deceptively simple thought experiment about coins. He asked us to imagine a society with no mint, no official currency, no shared authority declaring that a stamped disc of metal counts as money. In that society, people could hammer out their own discs, engrave them however they wanted, and exchange them as they saw fit. But none of these would be “counterfeit coins,” because there would be no genuine coins in the first place.

A counterfeit, Ryle suggested, presupposes an original. The imitation only makes sense by reference to something authentic.

Ryle’s goal wasn’t to teach economics. Rather, he was demonstrating how many of our concepts are polar pairs, logically dependent on each other. “Fake” makes sense only because the real exists. “Incorrect” matters only because something can be correct. And a coin becomes “counterfeit” only when there are authentic coins to be copied. You cannot meaningfully understand one without the existence and intelligibility of the other.

For decades, this served as a neat philosophical point about meaning. But today, in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), it's perhaps casts light on something much more urgent that sits at the center of how we understand authenticity, creativity, human agency, and even how we work.

AI is capable of generating text, imagery, strategies, messages, and conversations that often feel surprisingly human. In some cases, these outputs compete with or even surpass the speed or polish of human work.

This raises the obvious question: if machines can simulate so much, what remains unique about what people create and experience?

Ryle’s coin analogy gives us a foundation for thinking about that question and for understanding the stakes of the work we're doing as we reimagine and rebuild the marketing function at Pearl Health. It helps explain why AI is powerful and also why its power depends on something prior: the human experiences, commitments, and values that give our work meaning.

This is especially important for marketing, where authenticity can make the difference in whether a message resonates. Messaging is most effective when it originates from a genuine understanding of real people, real struggles, and real goals.

At Pearl, for example, we're acutely aware that, when we communicate with physicians and executives at leading care organizations, they immediately sense whether a message arises from understanding or from generic imitation.

This is where Ryle’s thought experiment becomes truly useful. It reminds us that authenticity is not a stylistic flourish. It's an origin story.

The Age of Artificial Outputs: Surface Artifacts & the Meaning Beneath Them

We now live in a world where AI can produce what look like highly polished “coins” of marketing: essays, images, strategies, taglines, analyses, workflows, conversations. AI can generate a full marketing campaign. It can draft a competitive positioning overview. It can design imagery, craft narratives, and assemble content calendars.

At times, these outputs are astonishing. At other moments, they can feel a bit eerie: too good, too quick, too frictionless. And we ask: Are these real? Are these authentic? Or are these "counterfeits," artifacts that seem human but aren’t?

The answer, Ryle might say, depends on what we take the “genuine coin” to be.

If the genuine coin is the surface artifact — the copy, the image, the polished sentence — then AI can produce them with startling facility. AI excellently replicates patterns. It can recognize shapes in language. It can detect correlations in how people talk about healthcare, value-based care, risk adjustment, and care delivery. 

But if the "genuine coin" is the origin — the lived experience, the caring intention, the embodiment of values, the situated judgment that gives meaning to that artifact — then AI cannot counterfeit that. For example, AI doesn't know the tension of being responsible for both patient outcomes and practice finances. It doesn't know what it feels like when a physician must balance empathy with time pressure.

In other words, AI can effectively simulate the surface of communication, but humans still supply the meaning beneath it. Ryle’s analogy reveals why: the machine’s output gains meaning only because it stands in relation to human experiences. 

Without human originals, there's nothing to imitate. Machines can generate poetry because humans wrote poetry first. Machines can imitate marketing messages because humans struggled, experimented, debated, and crafted narratives long before transformers and diffusion models existed.

The Irreducibility of Human Origins

Is the authenticity of an action tied not simply to its output, but to the context, intention, and lived experience that produced it?

Ryle’s analogy suggests something deeper about authenticity: origin matters. A fake coin may weigh the same, look the same, and circulate in the same ways as a real one. Yet it's not genuine because it doesn't originate from the right context. It lacks the connection to the institution, authority, and communal trust that give a coin its identity (let's put the debate on centralized vs. decentralized digital currencies aside for a moment).

The same is true for work created by humans versus work produced by AI. Even when the surface results look similar, their origins differ. This difference isn't abstract or romantic; it's practical and conceptual. Human work emerges from real responsibilities, personal histories, relationships, values, and lived experience. It carries moral weight. It carries emotional consequences. It carries an internal viewpoint shaped by real participation in life.

In contrast, AI doesn't have vantage points; it doesn't stand to lose anything. It doesn't feel the consequences of misunderstanding a physician’s needs or misrepresenting a patient’s experience.

Authenticity comes from where something is born, not just from how it looks. It's the experience, values, and human commitments from which it arises. This recognition will guide me at Pearl as we reimagine what it means to do marketing — and how to practically do it efficiently, effectively, and authentically — in an AI-supercharged landscape. 

Rebuilding a Marketing Team: AI-First, Human-Grounded

As we rebuild marketing at Pearl, it won't just be a reorg; we're rethinking the operating system for how we communicate, collaborate, and learn. In the days ahead, we'll rearchitect how we generate insight, tell stories, collaborate cross-functionally, and connect with physicians and partners across the country. 

But we must be conscientious about how we do it. Our work sits at the intersection of healthcare, technology, and human relationships. This means our marketing must be precise, empathetic, honest, and deeply grounded. It must reflect the lived realities of physicians, care teams, and executives of complex healthcare organizations, not the abstractions of a model.

At the same time, our marketing team must move faster, learn faster, and operate with greater clarity — and, like many teams who are now being asked to do the same right now, do more with less. AI allows us to do that. It helps us iterate, test ideas, refine messaging, generate components of strategy, and eliminate repetitive tasks that slow humans down.

But our guiding principle is clear: AI should expand human capability, not replace human grounding. The technology is a tool for acceleration, not a substitute for authenticity. This isn't just a philosophical stance; it's a practical requirement for a mission-driven company in healthcare. So as we rebuild marketing to be AI-first, we're not simply chasing efficiency. We're also trying to build a marketing function that's:

• Faster, but not shallower

• More productive, but not more generic

• More data-informed, but not less human

• More creative, not merely more automated

• More strategic, not merely more prolific

This balance — between scale and substance, automation and authenticity — will be at the heart of what it will mean to build an AI-first marketing organization aligned with Pearl’s mission. And, more pragmatically, the team and I will need to work through our answer to the question: what must remain human for our work to stay authentic, aligned, and meaningful?

What AI Gives Us (and Why We’re Embracing It)

It likely goes without saying at this point, but AI is valuable to marketing in several ways, and its capabilities align directly with the needs of a modern healthcare company: 

1. Speed & experimentation.

AI helps us produce more, test more, and learn more without sacrificing the quality bar. We will generate multiple hypotheses, narratives, and frameworks in minutes, allowing us to explore more territory before converging on the right idea.

2. Pattern recognition.

AI can detect trends and behavioral signals across content, channels, and audiences. This will help us make data-informed decisions faster.

3. Personalization at scale.

Different segments, markets, and organizations require different stories. AI-augmented tools will help us tailor narratives, outreach, educational content, and workflows to meet people where they are without losing coherence.

4. Reduction of mental overhead. 

Marketing involves many repetitive or mechanical tasks, like data cleaning, campaign setup, brief generation, and competitive monitoring. AI will absorb these tasks, allowing humans to focus on creative and strategic work.

5. Creative expansion.

AI isn't just a time-saver; it’s a creativity multiplier, allowing us to see possibilities we might not have imagined. It will help us iterate quickly, explore new narrative angles, generate variations, and create unexpected connections that provoke new ideas. 

A Call-to-Action for Marketers in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The advantages afforded by AI can help marketers improve our craft to bring more thoughtfulness to market segmentation, content development, customer communication, field marketing, and the broader narrative. 

But none of these benefits replace the human foundation needed to guide marketing. They only scale it. This acceleration also introduces a new responsibilities:

• We must ensure that speed does not outrun fidelity. 

• We must ensure that scale does not dilute truth.

• We must ensure that efficiency does not erode empathy.

This is where Ryle’s insight becomes our compass.

The Genuine Coin of Pearl Health’s Marketing

At Pearl, the “real coin” of our marketing won't be the artifacts: the email, the campaign, the landing page, the deck, or the ad. It'll be the human perspectives that fuel those artifacts: the stories from the field, the conversations with physicians and healthcare executives, the insights from care teams, the frustrations and triumphs that define healthcare today.

Our marketing must be rooted in:

• the healthcare executive thinking through how best to balance priorities

• the PCP who stays late to make one more phone call

• the care navigator trying to triage a high-risk patient

• the clinician trying to keep a small practice alive

• the patient trying to navigate a fragmented, confusing system

• the belief that care can be better, simpler, more human

AI can help us tell these stories more powerfully, but it can't originate them. It can help us express these truths, but the source remains human. That's why, even as we build AI-accelerated workflows, we're doubling down on:

• Field research

• Qualitative interviews

• Conversations with care teams

• Thought partnership with product and clinical leadership

• Relationships with physicians and partners

• Grounding in lived reality

These will be the minting presses where the real coins — our authentic perspectives — are forged.

The Importance of Good Human Marketers

As AI becomes more capable, human judgment becomes more necessary, not less. The marketer’s role evolves in several critical ways, as AI helps generate variations and produces possibilities: 

• Curator. Humans must discern the message that deserves to endure.

• Taste-maker. Humans must decide what feels aligned with mission and values — and what deserves amplification. 

• Ethical compass. Humans must guide, determining what is appropriate to say, when to say it, and how to frame it responsibly. 

• Narrative architect. Humans must maintain coherence across channels, segments, and touchpoints. 

• Bridge to real context. Humans must integrate field insight with strategic communication.

• Guardian of meaning. Humans must ensure that we speak truthfully about what we do and what we believe.

This is why Ryle’s analogy matters so much here: the counterfeit only exists relative to the genuine. The simulated only exists relative to the lived. The automated only exists relative to the intentional.

Our job in marketing is to protect the original — not by shunning AI, but by ensuring that AI amplifies, rather than erodes, the human meaning at the center of our work.

What It Means to Be Human in an AI-First Marketing Organization

Being human in this new environment doesn't mean clinging to old workflows; it means elevating the uniquely human skills that AI can't counterfeit. This includes but isn't limited to: empathy, responsibility, narrative judgment, ethical awareness, contextual understanding, lived experience, the ability to connect with another person's struggle, the courage to take a stand, and the creative instinct to make meaning (just just content). These are the qualities that make marketing not just a profession, but a craft and – for some – a calling. 

In marketing efforts at Pearl and beyond, I plan on using AI in to expand capacity, not replace humanity. AI will help reduce noise, not drown out truth. I'll push to use AI to scale clarity, not automate sameness. And in doing so, I'm optimistic we'll discover something hopeful: AI won't diminish what it means to be human in marketing; it'll sharpen it. 

Embracing an AI-first marketing operating model and the uniquely human role we must play will force us to articulate our values more clearly. It will force us to differentiate substance from appearance. It will force us to protect meaning from mere mimicry. It will force us to honor the lived reality of the people we serve. It forces us to be better.

The Future We’re Building & Human Responsibility

Rebuilding Pearlh’s marketing function to be AI-first isn't about replacing humanity. It's about freeing humans to do the work that only humans can do. It's about creating more space for reflection, understanding, authenticity, and creativity.

Ryle’s lesson remains a guidepost. The imitation depends on the original. The automated depends on the intentional. The simulated depends on the lived.

AI may produce impressive copies, but it cannot mint the genuine coin. That responsibility still belongs to us.