iHeartMedia has made Guaranteed Human part of its legal ID. So that bit at the top of the hour where a station reads out its call letters now also says a person made this. And their research has 90% of listeners wanting media made by humans, while 70% of those same listeners use AI tools themselves. Which tells you roughly how settled any of us are about it, and I'd include myself in that.
They haven't stopped using AI either. Scheduling, insights, workflow, show prep, editing. So the claim is narrower than it sounds. The voice you hear belongs to a person, and that's the whole of it.
Which is the interesting part
As a blanket promise it would be worthless. Humans everywhere is a cost base wearing the language of a strategy. What they've done instead is pick the one place a person has to be and let the machines have the rest.
We're mostly walking the other way, and I've spent a good part of a career doing it. The pitch is how much we've automated, how many tickets close without anybody touching them, how the agent handles tier one now. All true and all worth doing. And then somewhere near the back there's a slide about our people, which nobody reads because it's the same slide. I've written that slide.
People don't remember an average
They remember the most intense moment and they remember the ending, and the duration of it doesn't really register.
So look at where thirty years of shift left took the humans out. Out of the moment it breaks and you don't yet know how bad it is, deflected to a portal. And out of the close, where somebody used to ring and confirm it was genuinely fixed. The peak and the ending.
I reported the average for years while my customers walked away holding two moments I'd never once been asked about.
So that's what Guaranteed Human has to mean, and it isn't a person everywhere. It's a person exactly where it counts. Which is the whole of shift right, argued by a radio company rather than by me.
Because silent and instant earns you nothing. Nobody can credit what they can't see.