HumanAI founded

Business brings together technology, human intuition to provide marketing needs

HumanAI brings the human element to using artificial intelligence in marketing companies.

The home-based business was featured in a Farragut West Knox Chamber of Commerce-sponsored ribbon cutting in Farragut Community Center Tuesday, Jan. 30.

Long-time friends Chuck Wilson and Preston Garland of Farragut, as well as Erich Necherle, founded the Farragut-based business in May 2023.

Artificial intelligence has “been a buzz word pretty much since Chat GPT came out,” Wilson said. “It’s just never been available to everyone. Now it is.

“What we do, at HumanAI, is we focus to help small- to medium-sized businesses with marketing content,” he added. “A lot of people are anxious about AI, and we believe the best solution is using the powerful capabilities of AI matched with human intuition — hence, HumanAI.

“We’re able to use our proprietary software with AI and generate marketing campaigns. Those are all reviewed individually by the companies, our customers. It’s kind of putting that human intuition touch to present the final product for them.”

“The thing that excited me so much with the technology, when we started to see it and see what was possible, is you’ve got every single business — smallest to largest — (having) something special and unique about them,” Garland said. “They have a story to tell. They have an audience, they have customers. They care about that story.

“I’m sure there are people who are like their customers that don’t know their story,” he added. “That’s what we saw: ... a number of them, they can’t really get that message out. They can’t share that message very easily.

“Just taking that core content of what makes them special and be able to share that in their voice, I think, is probably the piece that’s most important.”

“Our content is for any kind of digital content,” Wilson said. “Primarily we focus a lot on social media outlets — all platforms.

“We can provide content for someone’s newsletter or if someone is looking to put blogs on their site and even a press release,” he added. “What is unique about that is we’re able to present that in their voice and tone.

“We’re able to get the personality of the owner, founder and/or company and how that needs to be perceived on those marketing platforms.”

Wilson and Garland met in 2004, working in the same location, and quickly became close friends. Always bouncing ideas off one another, the two worked together again at another company, GRIDSMART. They partnered with Necherle to start the company.

“All three of us have a lot of things in common,” Garland said. “We bring those things, from the standpoint of being very customer-focused and being focused on solutions that actually help people at the end of the day. You can have the most amazing technology in the world, but if it doesn’t help anyone, who cares?”

He said they also are driven to “bring something to go from zero to one.”

At the same time, they bring different experiences and viewpoints. Necherle has prior marketing experience, Wilson brings sales experience and Garland brings technical experience.

After nine months, Wilson said the business is going well.

“We feel like we understand how (how) we fit in to someone’s marketing budget, how we bring that need (for quality of content) they have to them,” Wilson said. “We feel like we really are preparing for a large expansion.

“There’s a lot of things out there with AI,” he added. “To be very specific to what we’re doing, I’m not sure that there’s a lot that’s still believing in the human touch. A lot of tools are being created, but we believe in the value of a person being connected to clients.”

Since the company is not limited to social media platforms, “our content can be created for each platform,” Wilson said. “Each platform is different (so) the content is uniquely designed for that platform. It has the same message but it’s for each platform.”

Wilson said the customer can jump into the customer portal to approve any and all messages. “Nothing actually gets posted until it is approved by the customer,” he added.

The company can be reached by visiting usehumanai.com