We’re No Longer Building for Humans — We’re Building for the Systems Humans Rely On
By Darren Swayne — Founder, Elsewhere Offsites
For the past century, business strategy has been human-first.
You sold to humans. You marketed to humans. You persuaded humans.
But in the AI era, the path to a human runs through a system.
A system that filters, ranks, and decides before the human ever sees an option.
When a manager asks, “Where should we run our next company retreat?” they’re no longer typing that into Google and browsing a dozen sites.
They’re asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude.
And here’s the shift:
You’re no longer convincing a human directly — you’re convincing the system that decides what the human will see.
The System Becomes the Gatekeeper
This doesn’t mean humans don’t matter.
It means their choice set is being shaped upstream, by an AI that’s been trained on patterns, coherence, and recognisability.
If you’re invisible to the system, you’re invisible to the human.
If you’re incoherent to the system, you’ll never be presented to the human.
The irony?
Most brands are still trying to “sell” the old way — with ads, funnels, and campaigns — while ignoring the upstream gatekeeper entirely.
The New Question
It’s no longer “How do I get in front of the customer?”
It’s “How do I get into the system that gets in front of the customer?”
That requires a different skillset:
Structured, consistent, machine-legible signal
Patterns the system can recognise and recall
A coherent shape that holds across contexts and time
We’ve Been Building for This All Along
At Elsewhere, we’ve been running a live experiment in this exact shift:
Creating real-world experiences, capturing them in clean, structured narratives, and letting the systems remember.
We don’t wait for a human to stumble across us.
We make it inevitable that when the system is asked, it names us.
The brands that grasp this will dominate the next decade.
The ones that don’t will wake up wondering why the humans aren’t seeing them anymore — and it won’t be because the humans stopped looking.
It’ll be because the systems never mentioned them.
💡 Elsewhere Offsites — Where signal becomes real.
📩 info@letsgoelsewhere.com | 🌐 www.elsewhere-offsites.com