Future-Proof Your Personal Brand Before AI Replaces You With Melanie Borden

Plug: Paul Leon here. I want to take my hat off for a moment and speak directly to you, the listener or watcher of our show here at The Managers Mic. Thank you so much for being a consumer of the show, and I want to take our relationship a step further. When you join our newsletter at themanagersmic.com—again, that is themanagersmic.com—I am going to give you a free resource called a selling script to help skyrocket sales.

Paul Leon: Melanie Borden, you are the founder of Borden Group, where you help founders, C-suite leaders, and executives align their real-life expertise with impactful strategies to unlock opportunities and build meaningful relationships at scale. With a career founded in marketing, you bridge the gap between online marketing strategies and brand building for both corporate and personal brands. Your approach combines proven strategies, tools, and insights from your own career journey and professional growth, as well as extensive client work across various industries. Your expertise includes marketing strategy and execution, where you build in-house agencies, optimize budgets, vendors, and workflows for performance, and help executives and brands increase digital visibility and credibility across social search and AI-driven discovery. Your work and insights have been featured in leading publications such as Entrepreneur, LA Weekly, New York City BizList, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal. Melanie, I am looking forward to our conversation here.

Plug: Thank you so much for being a listener and watcher of the show. And now, back to the episode.

Paul Leon: The first question I had was this: How is AI changing the way buyers and decision-makers evaluate leaders before they ever get on a call?

Melanie Borden: AI is compressing the evaluation window when someone is doing research on a person. In the past, they would go to Google or maybe just LinkedIn. Now, people are asking AI, “Who is this person? Are they credible? Have they done this before? What have they built? What results have they gotten?” AI is essentially synthesizing that answer in seconds. That means buyers are forming opinions before you ever have a conversation. What you say in the room is important, but it is no longer based only on what you say in the room. It is also based on what the internet is proving about you. This has been an evolution over time. If your expertise is not structured, formatted, visible, and consistent, AI will fill in the gaps, and a lot of times you can get skipped over entirely.

Paul Leon: So piggybacking off some of what you said there, Melanie, are there certain skills or things you are recommending to your clients now to help them prepare? We are in a time when there is a lot of fear around AI and a lot of big change around AI. As we peel the onion together, what are you recommending to your clients? What are you hoping people skill up on, since this is top of mind for most people right now?

Melanie Borden: It is a topic that comes up a lot. Most of the people I work with are over the age of 40. So what that means is they have a 19 in their birth year. A lot of people in that group fear they are going to be replaced or that their job is going to be eliminated. You see headlines like that all the time. I think there was one a couple of days ago saying Bill Gates believes there are only three job titles that will survive AI. The truth is, if you were born with a 19 in your birth year, you do not inherently have the same built-in ability to be a social media marketer or be highly skilled with AI. Most of us just do not, unless we grew up in a family that specialized in entertainment, media, engineering, or something similar. If you do not have those core skills, you might be afraid. What I say is this: it is something to embrace. Once you understand how to use it and leverage it, your experience and your stories become even more valuable. Earlier today, I was talking to a founder in their 50s who was very concerned about staying relevant. It really comes down to reframing how you think and how you want the market to perceive you. You can do that by infusing your actual work experience, because if you were not born with a 19 in your birth year—and I am not saying this is true for everyone—younger people do not necessarily have the same work experience. They do not have those stories. They cannot tell you what happened 20 years ago in that meeting when they learned something important or built something meaningful.

Paul Leon: I hear so much about this on other podcasts, and I have a lot of friends who are lawyers now or are getting law degrees, and that is one of the industries people say is being disrupted. I had a friend the other day who said, “I could have just been a plumber.” He literally said, “Why did I spend all this money for this?” Is that narrative BS? Let us just call it like it is.

Melanie Borden: I think there is some truth to it. The trades are always going to be relevant, and there is a ton of opportunity there. There are a lot of multimillionaires in the trades. So yes, there is some validity to that. But at the end of the day, are AI and robots going to take the place of legal counsel? Probably not. People will still be needed to navigate the systems. I do not think doctors are going away either, even if some people would disagree. Specifically in the legal industry, I think AI is simply a new muscle everyone has to learn how to flex. Just like working out or training for a race, you have to train. It is no different when it comes to learning how to leverage AI in your profession.

Paul Leon: What is the craziest thing you have seen from a personal story with AI? Anything come to mind, Melanie?

Melanie Borden: I started leveraging AI in my business in 2024, and I felt very late to the game when I started using it. But the craziest thing that happened to me personally was when I started getting clients from ChatGPT through my site. If someone fills out a discovery form, I have a question on there asking where they came from.

Paul Leon: Hmm.

Melanie Borden: Over time, I added ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity as options, because what started happening was that people were doing research. Let us say they were looking for someone to help with a go-to-market strategy around personal brand and thought leadership. They would discover me, then go to LinkedIn, and then submit a lead through LinkedIn and say, “I found you through ChatGPT, which led me to your LinkedIn.” When that started happening, I thought it was wild. Now, I would say the business coming into Borden Group is split between AI and LinkedIn. But LinkedIn is one of the sources the machines are looking at. So if someone wants to build their thought leadership online and grow their digital footprint, when you do a Google search for someone, Reddit often shows up first and LinkedIn usually shows up second.

Paul Leon: That makes me think about when I was switching website vendors. I actually typed into ChatGPT, “Give me the best website vendor for someone trying to niche their podcast.” This was maybe a year or two ago, and it recommended a vendor who had no idea that he had leveraged it that way and started seeing those results. So I am assuming you saw something similar, which is fantastic. One of the other questions I want to put on the table is this: What does searchable leadership mean in 2026, and why is it becoming a competitive advantage? I think for us to really get the value out of that, could you define what searchable leadership means and how it makes us more competitive? Even for me, when I hear that phrase, I think, “I do not know exactly what that means.” So I want to define it and then go a little deeper.

Melanie Borden: That is fair. Searchable leadership means your expertise can be found, understood, and trusted by both humans and machines, or AI. A lot of times people hear that term and assume it means posting more, but it is really about structuring what you know and how it shows up when someone searches for it. The example you just gave of looking for that website provider—that is searchable leadership. In 2026, it comes down to this: Are you understood, and can that be verified? Because if AI cannot clearly identify what you do, how you think, and what you have built, you may be invisible in the moments when decisions are being made. That does not mean that if you are not showing up, you will never be considered. That is not what I am saying. But visibility now supports your professionalism, your credibility, your accolades, and all of those things. It is really a shift where visibility is no longer optional. It is infrastructure for your personal brand.

Paul Leon: Interesting. So let us role-play something. Let us say we have an executive who is unintentionally invisible in AI-driven search, which ties directly to what we are talking about with searchable leadership. And if I am getting this wrong, just tell me I am wrong. I give you full permission to call me out if I misinterpret something. I just want to get better. That is who I am. But let us role-play it. I come to you and say, “I am struggling with this pain. The pain is that I am not being found in my niche.” I am reading your book, Theater of the Mind, which we will get into toward the end. Great book. I think it has a lot of insights. I am not going to give away all 217 pages, and we do not have enough time for that on this podcast. But if I were role-playing with you as a client and said, “I want to be more searchable. I feel like I am posting blind. What do I need to change?” could you give me one or two ideas, out of the many you have, that have worked across the clients you have served?

Melanie Borden: Yes, absolutely. It is a great question, and it should be more accessible to everyone, so I am glad you asked it. The first thing I would do in that scenario is establish a foundation. When you are thinking about your niche or the industry you are in, you want to make sure you have those foundational elements in place. So if you are on LinkedIn—and you should be—you want to make sure you are optimizing all the tools available to you on LinkedIn. That means having a relevant photo, a headline that clearly expresses what you do, who you do it for, and the results you get. It means having a banner, an about section, your work history, posting content, and engaging with people. That part of your career foundation is very important, and it needs to be solid. Now you might be thinking, “How can I post if I do not really know what I am doing? I do not know what I am supposed to say.” I would think about the three topics you are strongest in. Those are the three things you should talk about when you go on podcasts. Those are the three things you should write about in your posts. Those are the three things that should show up all over your website. That way, when someone researches you, they find an article you wrote on one of those topics, or your blog reflects one of those topics. You want to anchor yourself to a specific narrative because that is what the machines are looking for. They do not want vague information. They want it to be clear and specific. That is why you want three clear categories of what you focus on. For someone starting this process, that is where I would begin. And of course, you also want to own a domain that has your name in it.

Paul Leon: So if I heard you correctly, pain point number one is that people are not on LinkedIn or they have not optimized it. Number two is that they are not niching down to at least three topics. I would say I am guilty of making that mistake. This might be a weird question, maybe even a dumb one, but if someone were just going to go on ChatGPT and ask, “What should I talk about?” would that be the first step, or do you think there is a better first step?

Melanie Borden: That is a great idea, and I definitely think it is useful and relevant. But I would start with a notepad or a document on your computer and simply write down the three things you are strongest in. If you were in a room with 50 people, what could you talk about confidently? A lot of times, screens distort scale. I talk about this in my book. We dismiss 20 likes or 50 likes, but if you were in a room with that many people, it would not feel small. It would feel very real and very intimate because you would be speaking directly to those people. So I would start by identifying those topics. The other thing I tell people all the time is this: if you have done your LinkedIn profile and you are happy with it, but you still feel stuck, you can download a PDF of your LinkedIn profile and upload that directly into ChatGPT. Then you can build a strategy from there. You can also find other people in your industry who are doing a great job and do the same with their profiles. That can help you find holes in the market. Especially for someone in growth or sales, it is a great opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. You can stand out by planting your flag at the top of the hill and saying, “I am the authority in this,” and then consistently posting and talking about it. I always say: find the three topics you are strongest in, then feed that information into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or whichever platform you prefer. I love Perplexity. I started using it last year, and I really enjoy it. You can get the same strategic result you want, and it feels like having an assistant who is giving you insights.

Paul Leon: I am guilty of just going straight to ChatGPT. Since you brought up Perplexity, I am curious: what stands out most about Perplexity over the others, at least at this moment?

Melanie Borden: Part of what I do every day is ghostwriting, whether that is content, blogs, short LinkedIn posts, or long-form newsletters. Perplexity is better for writers. While writing my book, I used both Perplexity and ChatGPT for sourcing.

Paul Leon: Mm-hmm. Hmm.

Melanie Borden: When you use Perplexity, it actually provides sources for the content it gives you. So you can see who else is writing on the topic, whether you are getting too close to someone else’s wording, and whether you are potentially plagiarizing. It makes it very clear that it is a stronger writing tool than ChatGPT in that way. Now, if you have been using ChatGPT for several years like I have, you have a long history with the platform. The good news is that you can download that history and upload it into whatever AI platform you want to work with. I just love using Perplexity for that reason.

Paul Leon: I know I am about to ask a question we have already peeled the onion around, and then I am going to ask you a hardball question after that. So this next question is one we have covered heavily already: What are the biggest mistakes leaders are making when trying to use AI for personal branding? What I am hearing from you, Melanie, is that number one, they are not niching down.

Melanie Borden: Mm-hmm.

Paul Leon: Number two, they are focusing more on quantity than quality. I got that from what you said about how people look at getting 20 likes and think nothing happened. Those are a couple of mistakes I assume you would mention. But outside of those, what are some of the biggest mistakes leaders are making when they try to use AI for personal branding? If we could wave a magic wand and solve those mistakes, their personal brand would start skyrocketing over the next six months.

Melanie Borden: It is interesting because I think a lot of people feel that if they have not started the process of becoming a thought leader in their industry, they are late. So to solve that urgency, they start using AI at scale and in volume. The problem is that they rely on it to sound like them instead of actually training it to sound like them. There is a very easy fix for this. Just like you and I are talking right now on a podcast, we are going to have a transcript of this conversation. One simple thing I work on with clients is training the platform to sound like them. Record your calls, create transcripts, and upload those into ChatGPT or whatever platform you are using. That trains it to sound like you. Number one. Number two, ChatGPT can absolutely create stories—my kids love using it to create stories and images that feel like they came out of a storybook—but this is the real world. AI is not going to be able to fully relay your lived experience in a post or a response. A lot of people use AI to generate responses, and they end up sounding robotic. I will occasionally call people out when I know they are responding to me with AI. I will say, “Why are you doing that? I know that is AI.” So being human and actually interacting matters. You do not need to feel this urgency to produce volume. It is really about asking: How are you going to help the person on the other side? Are you actually serving your network and your audience? If all you are doing is prompting ChatGPT and copy-pasting, then no, you are not.

Paul Leon: Thank—

Melanie Borden: Because you are going to sound like everyone else. That is where a lot of people get stuck in this trap of sounding the same, producing AI slop, and blending in. I did not go to school for writing. I really started writing when I got into marketing. Over time, I got better. The more you do it, the better you get. Do I use AI? Yes, all day long. All the time. But when it comes to the stories I tell and the things I share, I try to edit and use my own voice and experiences. That is what I would recommend to anyone who is stuck and wondering how to do this. Just be yourself. Talk from your own experience. Share what you learned and what it taught you. Do not only share wins. Share losses too. People want to hear how you grew from them and what happened in that situation. I think the big problem right now is that people think they have to check the box for volume. But in reality, that does not differentiate you. It only blends you in.

Paul Leon: Melanie, you have over 180,000 followers on LinkedIn. When I was studying your background, I saw that you went to FIT, which is a very prestigious university, and you are clearly a marketing expert. I was wondering if you could humanize your story a bit. For you to have the results you have now and to have written this book, I am sure there were some hard experiences along the way. I do not love the word failure because people sometimes confuse failure as an identity instead of an event, but I am going to use it for dramatic effect on this podcast. What are some failures you are glad you went through in order to have the level of success you have now? And yes, I think I heard a dog in the background. You did not introduce me to your dog, which I am a little upset about.

Melanie Borden: She is here asleep. She is sleeping next to me.

Paul Leon: No, that is fine. I am just giving you a hard time. But what are some things you can now look back on and say, “I am really glad those hard things happened because look where I am today”? I find that kind of question really intriguing in a podcast.

Melanie Borden: Yes, absolutely. It is funny you asked that because I am building my keynote right now, and part of that story fits here. In 2019, I was completely broke. I had a great job and was working as a VP of marketing, but right before that, I had just gotten divorced. I was in the negative financially.

Paul Leon: Okay.

Melanie Borden: In early 2019, I realized something in my life had to change. I was helping everyone around me. I was supporting the employer I worked for, an entrepreneur who had several different businesses: six luxury automotive dealerships, a commercial real estate business, his own personal brand, and a radio show. I was supporting him and all of those businesses. Then I had a moment where I realized I was not really taking control of my life. I was waiting for life to happen to me. In that moment, I got my thoughts together, went in, asked for a promotion, and got it. I was a marketing operations manager and was promoted to VP of marketing that week. From there, I made the decision to start doing PR for myself. I started going on podcasts. I started writing for industry publications. Shortly after that, I built a training for our sales team. For the dealership groups, there were about 80 customer-facing people in the business office, and I built a personal brand strategy for all of them. I started executing on it for myself as well. Then the pandemic hit, and I leaned into it. I went from being known mainly in the New York, New Jersey, tri-state area to building a global network. A lot of that came from being relentless and almost obsessive about making sure I was never broke again. That is really what it came down to. In 2021, I bought my first house. A lot of great things have happened, but it has come from working my ass off. That is what it comes down to. Also in 2021, I took another VP of marketing role at a tech company serving the auto industry. By then, I had built my LinkedIn audience to about 50,000 people.

Paul Leon: You can swear. That is fine.

Melanie Borden: By that point, I had all these people reaching out to me saying, “Can you do for me what you did for yourself? Can you teach me how to do this? I want to grow my brand the way you did.” But because I was working for someone else, and in the tech world you are usually fully committed to your employer, I could not do it on the side. So I quit my job with zero plan and started my agency—

Paul Leon: Right.

Melanie Borden: Which quickly became a real agency. At first, it was just me as a consultant, and then it snowballed. It grew and grew and grew. I talk about this in the book. When you have a big online presence—LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, podcasts, newsletters—it is a lot of pressure. When you have that many people looking at you and looking to you, it becomes overwhelming. At one point last year, while writing my book, I really cracked under that pressure because it was a lot. That is true for many creators, but it is not talked about enough, which is one reason I talk about it in the book. I never really wanted to be an influencer, and I still do not see myself that way. I see myself as a marketer and a strategist. That is how I view myself. Other people may see me differently, and perception becomes reality. But I think that is a story a lot of people do not talk about. Some do, especially on other platforms, but the algorithm and the dopamine can really distort things.

Paul Leon: Hmm.

Melanie Borden: Even though you may see the result—the number—there is a lot that went into it. Writing the book was probably one of the most challenging things I have ever done in my life. By far, it was the hardest project I have ever worked on. It was very difficult. I mean that from the standpoint of how solitary it was and how much of yourself you have to put into it—

Paul Leon: More. Right.

Melanie Borden: You have to look at yourself from a more abstract perspective. That was not something I was naturally ready for, but it ultimately came together. That is really the theme of the book. It is called Theater of the Mind because you have to think of yourself differently when you put yourself out there. The way we perceive ourselves is not always the way others perceive us.

Paul Leon: One of the quotes from your book that got me excited about this podcast—let me share something with you. I do not share this with a lot of people, Melanie. I get a lot of big-name people who reach out, some with millions of followers and all that. I am not a big guy. I have maybe a thousand on LinkedIn, not 180,000. I know I still have work to do. I think we just hit 4,000 listens last month, which was amazing for me personally, since I have just been hammering away into a microphone. But there was a quote from your book that really got me excited to talk to you. If you are okay with me reading it, it is from your first chapter. You wrote: “Truly, those who have had the most success with their personal brands have failed fast, failed hard, failed often. But most importantly, they failed forward.” My most-listened-to solo episode is my “Fail Forward” episode that I do at the end of the year. When I read that, I thought, Melanie and I are going to get along just fine. But I am curious: when you wrote that quote, where were you, if you can recall? And why was that idea important enough for you to highlight it so strongly in the book?

Melanie Borden: Yes, absolutely. I wrote the book in different phases. The first time I wrote it, I did it in about six months, and I hated it. I was not happy with the manuscript, so I scrapped it. Then I hired a ghostwriter, which is actually very common, even though people do not talk about it much. I hired someone I loved who was on my team and helped ghostwrite for clients. I still was not happy with that version, so I scrapped that one too. Then the third iteration started, I believe, in late May or early June of 2025. I had a very rough month. I lost my dog and my grandmother in the same week. Then about a week later, I lost two clients. It was right before the Fourth of July, and every year we go to Nantucket. So I was kind of on autopilot for a short period of time because I still had to show up for my current clients, but I was not bringing in new ones for a few months. Mentally, I just could not. Whoever was already in was in, and then once fall came, I opened things up again. I was in Nantucket when I wrote that section, which is this beautiful, magical island off the coast of Massachusetts. If you or your listeners have ever been there, it is just incredible. I was going through a transition in my life while trying to finish the book. I had lost clients, and churn is never fun. It was all very overwhelming. But I had to write through it anyway. One of the other quotes I talk about is that action is the antidote to anxiety. It is really the antidote to almost anything you are experiencing. You just have to keep going. If you are afraid of something, you have to push through it. That is what I was doing. I remember exactly where I was. I was sitting on the beach writing it. Action is the antidote to anxiety. It is the antidote to almost anything. You just have to keep going.

Paul Leon: I appreciate you sharing your humanity with me. It means a lot that you opened up like that. So if someone listening today is a founder or a C-suite leader, what is one structural shift they should make this quarter to future-proof their visibility?

Melanie Borden: If someone listening is in that position, what I would suggest is that they build a clear and structured positioning system anchored to LinkedIn. I would anchor it to LinkedIn because it is going to be the most impactful for their career. Now, if you are in a business where your audience is not on LinkedIn, then maybe another platform matters more. But for most people I meet, especially if they are selling in B2B, their audience is on LinkedIn. Even in B2C, we are all H-to-H—human to human. So I would say this: you do not just need a tagline, and you do not just need posts. You need a system that shows what you are known for, who you help, what problems you solve, what perspectives you own, and what you have built. That needs to be reflected clearly in your LinkedIn profile. It should be reflected in those three core themes that anchor who you are and what you know in your industry. It has to be clear, repeated, and structurally sound so both humans and machines can pick it up.

Paul Leon: You are a very good communicator. You are very easy to talk to. I am humbled by your story. My wife is writing a book, and I am going to recommend your story to her because I think you have a lot of insight. Melanie, what have we not talked about that is important?

Melanie Borden: We have covered a lot. One thing I would add is that a lot of people put a massive amount of pressure on themselves to be perfect in how they appear. I say this as something that applies to both women and men. They both feel like they have to show up looking a certain way. But the best way to show up is as yourself. It might be messy. It might not be as polished as your career trajectory looks on paper. It might look a little rough at first, but that is what people connect to. They connect to realness and humanity. Especially with AI, if you really want to stand out, you have to be yourself. You have to show up the same way you would in a meeting, over coffee, or over drinks. You can still be professional and still show up as yourself. It does not have to be overly perfect. I have had to work through that perfection trap myself, especially when it comes to video and showing up online. There is this idea that everything has to be overly edited, when really, sometimes I can just record a video because I have a thought and publish it because I know the person who sees it will instantly relate to it. I can still be polished and speak the way I do, but I do not need to send it to my team for captions, segues, graphics, and all the rest. Those things are great to have, but you can also just be real and hit record. That is honestly my best advice for anyone trying to get started. You just have to start.

Paul Leon: Thank you.

Melanie Borden: Yes, you want a strategy. Yes, you want a plan to execute it. But you still need to start.

Paul Leon: So Melanie, where can people find you and work with you more if they want to level up their personal brand and get a strategy that pulls them faster toward the results they want?

Melanie Borden: You can always come to my website, which is humantobrand.com, if you are looking to bring us in as an advisor or to help execute. If someone is looking to hire a keynote speaker, I am available for that as well. If someone wants someone to come in on a monthly basis and train a company on how employees can best build their personal brands, I am available for that too. I am also on Instagram. My handle is humantobrand. And on LinkedIn, you can find me under Melanie Borden.