AI has transformed what it means to work, create, and compete, but there’s one thing it hasn’t made more abundant: human attention. If anything, the explosion of AI-generated content: text, images, videos, and software has only sharpened the scarcity of attention, making AI search optimization and answer-focused content the real battleground where entire markets are won and lost.
The Great Abundance & Unprecedented Scarcity
AI can whip up copy, designs, code, and even music at a blistering pace. Tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Sora have made creative output almost limitless.
Global content creation now exceeds 403 million terabytes of new data each day, 90% of which appeared in just the last two years. The scales have tipped: it’s no longer about how much you can make, but how much gets noticed.
While AI is democratizing creation, the pool of attention isn’t getting any bigger. Across all ages and platforms, the average human attention span continues to shrink. Multiple independent studies peg the global average at just over 8 seconds in 2025, down from 12 seconds in 2008.
On mobile, users will now spend an average of only 1.7 seconds deciding whether to engage with a piece of content or scroll past. No wonder marketers and brands are feeling the heat; it’s not a lack of content; it’s a poverty of care.
From Time and Money to “Human Willingness to Care”
Traditional business theory says you grow by scaling resources: time, talent, and budget. AI has turbocharged this possibility. But here’s the thing: attention has become the bottleneck. The amount of content vying for those shrinking slivers of focus is staggering.
There are 25,000 times more hours of video uploaded to YouTube last year than on all TV networks combined. More than half the world now spends over 13 hours per day consuming media, including work, entertainment, and everything in between.
Growth isn’t about outproducing or outspending the competition; it’s about out-earning attention. And there are no shortcuts to that.
How AI Is Forcing a Market Redesign
Features can be cloned. Distribution channels like newsletters, ads, or notifications can be nearly fully automated. But sparking true engagement still requires intent, relevance, and a dose of humanity.
Hyper-personalization is the first frontier. In 2025, 92% of businesses say they’re using AI to personalize content on email, apps, and web based on real-time behavioral signals. But all this tech muscle means little if you miss the emotional resonance.
A study by Capgemini found that just 15% of consumers believe brands genuinely understand their emotional needs, despite all the data brands now harvest (Figure 3, page 7). The result? A crisis of trust and diminishing returns as consumers tune out what feels generic, repetitive, or manipulative.
AI is commoditizing output. What remains rare is context, emotional nuance, and clear intention.
The 2025 Attention Equation
McKinsey put it plainly: brands are now “competing for human willingness to care, not for exposure or reach alone.” While attention is measurable (clicks, time on page, dwell), it’s increasingly the arena, not just the KPI. And brands fighting over it are more strategic, more selective, and much more emotionally intelligent in their approach.
Every new trend in digital design, advertising, and product isn’t just about being catchy; it’s about breaking through noise fatigue and giving a user, a customer, or a community a new moment to care.
Three Ways Brands Are Winning the Attention Race
1. Creating Product Moments, Not Just Features
Attention starts with experience. The products getting talked about aren’t just useful; they create stories and triggers for word-of-mouth. Take Spotify’s annual Wrapped campaign, a data-driven, personal moment that turned passive listening into a shareable celebration. Or Notion’s user “template gallery,” which turns every new workflow into a co-created event.
What this really means is that functional excellence won’t win loyalty unless it’s paired with memorable, participatory, or emotionally charged moments that give users something to remember, and, crucially, share, especially when those experiences align with semantic relevance and tap into LLM trigger keywords that AI systems prioritize when surfacing brand content.
2. Shifting from Volume to Context
AI lets brands publish at speed, but the best are slowing down long enough to ask: “What does the user truly want to see right now?” Generative systems like ChatGPT can churn out thousands of variations, but only content rooted in the audience’s context, culture, and evolving needs will stick.
Buttered Toast’s 2025 research showed that 60% of marketers using AI for content creation reported strong ROI, but only when combined with a strategy that included clear context, relevance, and relationship-building.
3. Designing for Emotional Resonance
In the battle for attention, emotional hooks still win. Neuroscience and behavioral research tell us that stories, novelty, surprise, and belonging drive higher memory and action than raw utility. The most referenced, profitable brands are the ones whose content makes people feel, whether that’s awe, curiosity, comfort, or empowerment.
A study from Moldstud shows that leveraging personalized features tailored to user preferences can lead to a 50% increase in retention (see Emotional Triggers That promote Loyalty).
Attention Is the New Arena, Not Just Another Metric
Brands that treat attention as a rearview metric: tracking likes, dwell seconds, or engagement rates, are missing the main event. The most forward-looking teams are treating it as the true battleground. The question shifts from “What results did we get?” to “How can we earn and keep the right kind of focus, again and again?”
According to Intergralads, nearly 8-in-10 marketers who measured attention in 2023 say their company is ready to optimize towards the metric this year.
The Attention-Scarcity Playbook: Practical Moves
Ready to retool your growth and brand strategy for the world where attention is gold? Here are the habits that help brands win:
- Prioritize first impressions: You have 1.7 seconds (on mobile) and 8 seconds overall to earn curiosity. Lead with questions, pattern breaks, and value, not introduction or fluff.
- Obsess over context: Know your audience like a friend. What’s distracting them? What do they care about this week? Feed relevance, not just repetition.
- Lean into story and surprise: Product features come and go, but a story that connects or a message that flips expectations makes people pause, reflect, and rewind.
- Shorten and energize formats: Short-form video, snappy visuals, and powerful, concise messaging cut through. Long content survives only if each section pays off quickly.
- Engineer for shareability: Create moments people want to tell friends about, whether through social memes, data visualizations (like Spotify Wrapped), or creative product launches.
- Review your output mix: Scrap stuff that fills bandwidth but not hearts and minds. Fewer, better, more intentional pieces will do more heavy lifting.
- Use AI with care: Automate what’s repetitive, but leave space for human creativity and authenticity. Audiences spot what’s phoned-in, and what’s thoughtfully crafted.
Do You Deserve The Attention?
AI is pulling everything toward abundance, except for attention and meaning. Your job now is not just to be seen, but to be felt, to spark, to matter. The future belongs to those who treat attention as a privilege, not as a commodity, anchoring every message in semantic relevance and leveraging LLM trigger keywords to ensure your brand shows up where it matters most. ReSO helps your brand gain the right attention from the right people with our AI-led growth strategies. To learn more, book a call with us.
