A CEO’s Balancing Act: Human Connection & AI

How do you balance leveraging AI in your work and maintaining authentic human connection as a marketer in 2025? 

Whether you’re an enthusiastic adopter, a reluctant participant, or cautiously optimistic about AI’s role in your industry, Jenise Uehara has some advice. 

With 20 years of experience in the marketing industry and as the current CEO of Alpha Brand Media, home to the much-loved Search Engine Journal, this Silicon Tech Valley CEO is no stranger to AI, authentic work, and innovation. 

Join the conversation as Uehara and Smart Route host Andrew Clark explore how marketers can successfully integrate AI into their strategy while staying grounded in what sets our work apart — human connection.

“Take a look at where [your biases] might be coming from and get to a place in the middle—to be objective, pragmatic, and to have strong opinions loosely held.”

Big Takeaways 

• Human connection can’t be replaced by technology. “I think at some point, the pendulum is going to swing back,” Uehara says, “and people are going to think about what it means to be human and the value in that.”
• Business leaders can use AI to free up time for more creativity and focus on building authentic connections with customers, something AI simply can’t replicate. “Saying, ‘Hey, let’s go to lunch,’ – you can’t replicate that.”
• Marketers need to embrace AI to stay competitive, but that doesn’t mean sacrificing the emotional and personal elements of business. “AI is not going to help you connect with people in the way that human interaction can. It can facilitate you getting there but it won’t replace it.”
• As AI becomes more pervasive in marketing, it’s easy to lose sight of the importance of human interaction. It just can’t replace the emotional engagement that comes with connecting on a personal level. 
• The key to helping businesses successfully navigate future challenges is using AI to enhance productivity and efficiency while prioritizing genuine relationships.
• “Eventually, you’re going to be asked about your comfort level and expertise with AI,” Jenise says – so you have to be ready for that, without ever sacrificing the unique perspective you, as a human, bring to the industry…something AI can never replicate.

Listen to the full episode for more insights on balancing AI and human connection in 2025 and beyond.

About Jenise Uehara

Jenise Uehara is the CEO of Alpha Brand Media, the parent company of Search Engine Journal. This leading digital publisher has provided top-tier guides and news for marketers for over 20 years. With nearly two decades of experience in tech and leadership, Jenise began her career as a program manager at PointCast, a pioneer in push technology.

She later joined Homepage (now Openwave Systems), where she held roles spanning product, strategic alliances, and sales operations, ultimately serving as Director, Deals Desk. In 2007, she led Henrikson Media, a digital publisher acquired by Alpha Brand Media in 2010. Passionate about leadership development, online media, and innovative work culture, Jenise is dedicated to empowering teams and fostering mutually beneficial opportunities for advertisers and audiences.

Check out Search Engine Journal or connect with Jenise on Linkedin!

Episode Transcript

Andrew Clark:
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to a new season of the Smart Route Podcast. My name is Andrew Clark, and I’m the SEO and content strategist at CallTrackingMetrics. You probably haven’t heard from me before—I joined CallTrackingMetrics last summer. After a longer-than-expected summer break, we’re back with a new season, and I couldn’t think of a better way to kick things off than by having an industry veteran on the show.

If you’ve been following digital marketing, SEO, or PPC, you’re likely familiar with our guest—Jenise Uehara, CEO of Search Engine Journal and Alpha Brand Media. Jenise, welcome to the show and thank you for being here.

Jenise Uehara:
Thank you for having me! I didn’t realize I’d be your first guest after the break—how exciting.

Andrew Clark:
Yes!

Jenise Uehara:
I’ll do my best to keep our conversation engaging.

Andrew Clark:
Absolutely.

Jenise Uehara:
I’m so happy to be here and flattered that you invited me.

Andrew Clark:
For some context on how we initially connected, I was inspired to reach out after reading your op-ed following Semrush’s acquisition of Search Engine Land. You had written about the future of online media in this industry, and it really resonated with me. I thought, Why not aim high? Let’s see if a CEO has time for our little podcast. You were gracious enough to say yes, and here we are.

We’ve gone back and forth leading up to this, and I think we’re going to cover some great topics in this episode. But before we dive into what’s ahead for search marketing in 2025 and beyond, I’d love for you to share a bit about your background—how you got into this industry and what keeps you motivated.

Jenise Uehara:
Oh my gosh—okay!

I started in tech after college, but I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do. I ended up moving to Hawaii, where I have family, and found myself working for what would now be considered an outsourced IT services company. One of our biggest clients was Bank of Hawaii, and we supported businesses across Oahu.

At the time, I was an admin—handling general office tasks like filing, typing, and emails. But I quickly fell in love with technology. I watched the techs install computer systems, set up networks, troubleshoot programs, and train people on how to use them. I knew there was a career path for me in there somewhere—I just wasn’t sure if I’d become an engineer or take on a more client-facing role.

I eventually got into training and became familiar with one of the early CRM systems, GoldMine. Oh wow, that really dates me! That was long before Salesforce—at least a decade earlier.

I just knew that I really enjoyed learning about it, what it could do, and the possibilities of technology. Eventually, I moved back to California and Silicon Valley, and I’ve been here ever since. I spent the next 15 years in business operations, sales operations, and product management. I did not learn to code but stayed on the business side, and I really enjoyed it.

And in 2007, I quit my job. I was going to take some time off and then go back out and look.

My husband at the time had started a side business with a lot of content blogs monetized with AdSense. It was the whole make money while you sleep kind of deal.

Imagine if you had 50 blogs making five bucks a day—you’d throw some content up and figure out this rankings game.

He said, We’ve got to keep these sites up with fresh content. We have a writer, and you’re good at writing—why don’t you give it a shot?

I thought, Why not? If I don’t like it, I’ll just go back to tech.

And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. I love it—I love the flexibility, working from home, having a team from all over the world, and using all the tools people rely on today to stay connected.

Jenise Uehara:
I never feel like I’m in an outpost because of Slack, Google Meet, and tools like this.

So that was 2009. Fast forward to 2010—that’s when I met Lauren Baker, the founder of Search Engine Journal.

He had some websites that needed tending to, but his hands were full with his agency. At the time, there were three other partners, and they had similar setups.

You know how it is in this business—you’re creating all these websites that generate revenue for other people, and then you think, I could do that. So you buy a bunch of domains or websites, and then realize, Oh, I don’t actually have time for this.

So we merged all the sites together, along with our companies. I started managing Search Engine Journal along with about 30 other sites. Over the years, Search Engine Journal kept rising to the top.

It maintained its audience, held its rankings, and had the most viable business model compared to the others, which were really just built around the idea of doing the minimum to rank for a niche term and monetizing with ads.

Jenise Uehara:
So eventually, I’d say about 10 years ago, we sold off everything else and decided to go double down and put 100% of our effort into Search Engine Journal.

Andrew Clark:
Well, that must have been quite the discussion at the time if you were going to go fully in on one of the sites. I can’t imagine, just knowing—I’ve been in this industry for about 10 years now. I started out in social media management specifically, but more recently moved into SEO.

Jenise Uehara:
Yeah.

Andrew Clark:
But yeah, could you describe for listeners what the digital landscape was like at that time? And, you know, compared to now, which we’ll get into. But yeah, what was it like?

Jenise Uehara:
Well, you know, it was the Wild West. If you had a nice keyword in your domain name, oh, that was sweet.

Andrew Clark:
Yes, just a little bit.

Jenise Uehara:
Because you could throw up some content like this—it was much, much easier to rank than sites today. And, you know, we didn’t do anything spammy or scammy, but we had a lot of sites. It was a portfolio that was broad but shallow, is what I would say.

And over the years, Google got smarter, in a lot of good ways.

Andrew Clark:
Sure.

Jenise Uehara:
And as it became harder to keep some of these sites up without really being—without consistently presenting and publishing content that reflected deep expertise—it became important to show Google that you deserved to be in one of the top spots when people were searching for information on a thing.

Andrew Clark:
Right.

Jenise Uehara:
And so, over the years, as we started to see diminishing returns on those kinds of sites…

Jenise Uehara:
We kept coming back to Search Engine Journal. It always had deep content, and Lauren was always actively involved in the site to make sure that we were staying in the game because it’s always changing.

And so, making sure that the content was up to date, relevant, authentic, and credible had always been an underpinning of what we published there.

Andrew Clark:
Sure.

Jenise Uehara:
And it became, in a sense, a very easy decision. If we had to pick one site to double down on, it was, hands down, Search Engine Journal. It was a little hard to let go of the other sites—it was like, oh, we could just tweak this one thing or add on this one affiliate marketing commission model, maybe this product will work better. But eventually, we cut ties, made it official, and sold them off.

So yeah, we made that decision about 10 years ago. And then, around 2018, my husband and I separated.

Andrew Clark:
Sure.

Jenise Uehara:
And, you know, I don’t know if you know anyone who’s gone through a divorce, but it really just turns everything upside down—your life, your lifestyle, and makes you question, who am I? What am I doing?

Andrew Clark:
Mm-hmm.

Jenise Uehara:
I ended up throwing myself into my work, and Search Engine Journal became a lifeline for me.

Our team really started to come together, and I started to lean into what it means to be a leader, to have values, and to ask, what can I really do with this amazing team we’ve put together, the content we’ve built, and the foundation we have with our audience?

Jenise Uehara:
And I’ve just been up to my eyeballs in it ever since. So that’s…

Andrew Clark:
I mean, that sounds like an incredible silver lining now. I can’t imagine what it felt like at that time with both the business taking off and personal things happening in your life that could be traumatic and devastating.

Jenise Uehara:
Yeah.

Andrew Clark:
I’ve witnessed it, yeah. So, I’m happy that it seems like things have gotten better. And, you know, Search Engine Journal is known throughout the industry. I mean, it always comes to mind for me. As someone learning SEO, I was often directed to it. So many past managers told me to take a look at what was being talked about, and to this day, it’s still a great resource.

I think this nicely dovetails into what we were teasing at the top of the call about what’s coming up this year. As I mentioned, you wrote a really great op-ed about remaining independent. One of the trends we’re seeing, and I think it will only accelerate in 2025, is the consolidation of different verticals. Bigger companies are buying up publishers to establish a footprint and dominate the media landscape.

I’m curious to hear more, especially for listeners who maybe haven’t read the op-ed yet. What was your thinking at the time, and how do you see that shaping things this year?

Jenise Uehara:
Oh, great question. When I woke up to the news that our biggest head-to-head competitor as a publisher, Search Engine Land, was bought by one of the biggest players in the industry—and a big advertiser of ours—it was a…

I mean, it was a threat on many levels.

Everything from, you know, wow, they have a lot of resources. They have a lot of money.

And, you know, like I said, we were one of our biggest customers at the time.

So what did it mean for us? And then I started to think more broadly, because it always comes back to the audience, which most of our staff considers themselves part of. What does it mean for the industry at large, which I believe depends so heavily on—you just never know what you’re going to wake up to.

Jenise Uehara:
It’s not a very predictable life that we lead in this space.

Andrew Clark:
No.

Jenise Uehara:
And so, you know, we become news junkies, whether you like it or not, and you have to, because you don’t want your boss coming in and saying, “Hey, did you hear about that thing that just happened?” And that, I think, is going to skew all of our campaigns, right?

You want to be ahead of that, and you want to know what your competition is doing. It’s a constantly evolving landscape of what is working and what’s not. What happens when that news source, you know, is potentially not independent? I’m being careful here because, you know, Semrush has said, and from the outside looking in, I don’t have any insight into how the team is working or has changed, but they’ve maintained that the editorial team will have their independence.

You know, they can publish what they want. I haven’t been paying a lot of attention, honestly, since they got bought.

I haven’t heard or seen anything that would indicate they’re doing anything or publishing anything that would suggest a conflict of interest.

But it is something to think about.

Andrew Clark:
Absolutely.

Jenise Uehara:
As I think about our situation, independence comes at a cost for us. It is something that I believe is in the best interest of the company. And selfishly, it’s what I strongly prefer—being able to do what we want, when we want to.

Because of the things we do, which have so many nuances and things to consider, adding yet another voice with a lot of influence that may be counter to our dedication to publishing what is authentic, credible, and relevant to our audience— I don’t want anything to get in the way of that.

Andrew Clark:
Absolutely. I think that’s a really admirable take on being a publisher and trying to deliver something objective when there are so many outside forces pushing you to be subjective and cater to a particular perspective.

I’m just thinking about some of the recent developments we’ve seen in early 2025, like with WordPress and its future, and the internal squabbles and implications for everybody who uses WordPress.

Jenise Uehara:
Yeah…

Andrew Clark:
There are also changes coming around the acceleration of things like AI platforms and their impact on content development. For me personally, I see it as another tool in my toolkit, and something I have to consciously not surrender to fully. I still have to maintain an active voice and control in my work.

What we’ve discussed in preparing for this episode reflects that thinking—AI is neither all good nor all bad. It’s just a tool. And it’s up to us as search marketers and digital marketers to use it responsibly and think long and hard about how it’s used and what the right context is.

I think upskilling is essential, and for me, that’s something I believe will only increase—pressure on us as marketers to hone our skills and revisit the basics of marketing in some ways, but also be much more sophisticated when it comes to things like research. How do you frame questions for AI to help you in content development and research? I’d love to hear your take on this as well, as someone at the forefront of writing about these topics.

Jenise Uehara:
We’re really thinking about 2025. I had some thoughts about what it’s going to be like, and it’s kind of daunting to try to predict because it’s snowballing. I kept coming back to this idea, the phrase you just used: “back to basics.” I think a key to success for marketers in the future is to walk a fine line that will constantly be moving and changing course, understanding and adopting what’s good about AI right now that’s going to boost and give them superpowers in the work they’re doing, and what’s not good to use AI for.

What aren’t you going to be able to get away with? You can’t get away with having AI write all of your content wholesale and just hitting publish—that’s a very extreme bad example.
It’s not there. Could it get there? Maybe, probably.

Andrew Clark:
Potentially.

Jenise Uehara:
Sure. It’s not there yet.

But understanding where it is now and recognizing that it’s going to change tomorrow, next week, and the month after that—it’s kind of exhausting, honestly, to try to keep up. And layered on top of all that is some awareness of what your biases might be, your cognitive biases. Some of them you might be aware of, and some you might not be.

Last year, my team and I did a book club, and the book we read was about AI by Mustafa Suleiman, The Coming Wave.

He’s now, I think, the head AI person at Microsoft. He got the job after writing that book.
We got together in groups. It was about understanding the material, but also about understanding how people felt about it. I think everybody is going to eventually be in a position—some people more immediately than others—where they’re thinking, “Is AI going to take my job?”

Andrew Clark:
Yeah.

Jenise Uehara:
“Is AI going to take important parts of my job that I like?”

Andrew Clark:
That question.

Jenise Uehara:
And how do I feel about that? We talked through people’s hot takes and where that came from.
And, you know, some examples of biases are, you know, blind embracing of technology. “I, for one, welcome our AI overlords.”

Not great, because you lean too hard into it.

Andrew Clark:
Valid question.

Jenise Uehara:
It’s not going to be good. Or, um, AI is going to be the death of civilization, and whatever I can do to resist adoption or incorporate it into what I do is effort well spent. Also, you know, I encourage my team to look at both sides if they’re landing on either side of those opinions and to examine where that might be coming from.

And to get to a place in the middle, which is to be objective and pragmatic, and to have strong opinions loosely held.

Andrew Clark:
Yeah, I think you hit it spot on and mirrors much of my thinking around it as well. And yeah, I think what you just said about having a book club and having these deeper philosophical questions come up and being candid with one another on your team is really a great starting point. That’s something I’ve been trying to sprinkle in here at CallTrackingMetrics as well—raising these questions with teammates. I independently was reading, just because you mentioned a book, it was a work of fiction that came to me via my wife, called Hum. It’s a short novel, recently published, somewhat futuristic, but not too far out. It discusses the implications of AI in daily life.

Andrew Clark:
And centering it around one single family and how AI has changed the world around them. It just gave me a number of times a kind of internal “ick” reaction. But I took that as a great sign that, OK, this is sparking deeper thought within me. This is something I can take into the office and have a discussion with a colleague and say,

Hey, we’re developing AI products, and we are contributing to the acceleration of its adoption at large. But are we thinking through the ethics of it?

Are we thinking through several steps beyond just delivering a marketing service to someone? And I think that is a great thing. And I think for all listeners, if you’re not already doing that, do that. I think from that, all these other tendrils that we’re talking about—2025 and what’s to come.

Yeah, you talked about getting back to basics. I think we’re seeing the rebirth of stuff like offline marketing techniques that were kind of sidelined for the longest time—hey, now we’re going to revisit direct mail. 

We’re going to reconsider billboards and out-of-home. I mean, these things have always been happening, and I’m sure people listening have been doing it all along. But I’ve seen just kind of an upswell in articles that are being published by like SEJ, or seeing it on LinkedIn posts, other podcasts. So, there’s something percolating there. And I think all of us as marketers are kind of having this reawakening of, hey, we gotta really think long and hard about our profession and its future. Because like you said, AI could sweep up some of the aspects of what we do day in, day out.

Jenise Uehara:
I love that you brought up the book. I wrote it down. I want to read it. And I love that you said it brought up a couple of moments where you said “ick.”

And I’m guessing it was like an uncanny valley situation, kind of.

And, you know, in talking about getting back to basics and sort of old-school methods, maybe non-digital methods.

And what’s next door to our salesman? But, you know, I do think that in all of this, as we lean more and become more sophisticated in both identifying, using, adopting, and understanding AI, we’re going to keep circling back to connection.

Andrew Clark:
Yes, 100%.

Jenise Uehara:
I think that’s what it comes down to—human connection and being able to verifiably human, whatever that means. But where I know that a thing was made, whether it was art, writing, or talking to someone on the phone, I think at some point the pendulum is going to swing.

And their own human creation or being able to talk to someone is going to have its own unique value. You know, in the midst of swimming—we’re already swimming in AI content and services. 

You know, here in the Valley, I went to the city last Saturday, the city being San Francisco. And on one-on-one, there are these massive billboards, and it’s beautiful—landscape as you come over the hill from where I live south of the city. You come over the hill and you just see this, you know, Salesforce Tower, the bridges, the water, Alcatraz, and the city laid out in front of you. They have these big billboards on the side of the freeway. And you can always kind of get a pulse of whatever the hot topic is, the theme of the moment in tech, because they’re mostly dominated by tech advertisers. And about every other one was about AI.

One of them actually said, “Stop hiring humans.” So it was about an AI assistant, or I think it was actually a business development.

Andrew Clark:
Oh, wow.

Jenise Uehara:
Instead of hiring, you know, outsourcing or in-house a BD person, stop hiring humans, hire Eva.

I think it’s intriguing. And if that works, and there are use cases for it, and it doesn’t backfire on you, you know—take an objective and pragmatic look at it. I just think that at some point, the pendulum is going to swing back, and people are going to think about what it means to be human and the value in that—and being able to pick up the phone and talk to a real person.

Andrew Clark:
We couldn’t agree more. I mean, that is the core of our business here at CallTrackingMetrics. And we believe 100% in that. And yeah, like you said, certain things will never be able to be replicated, at least at this point in the foreseeable future, by AI. And all the things that come through these different mediums that are offline or direct…

Andrew Clark:
I’m just thinking about, do you have any phone call, like hearing somebody’s voice and the emotions behind it, their tone, doing video calls, the fact that we’re doing this right now, being able to see one another and just going off of that. And I love what you were saying about centering marketing in human connection again. I think that has been somewhat lost over the years and it’s hard to distill fully in digital.

Andrew Clark:
If that’s the sole focus of your marketing. But yeah, just getting back to how do we connect with people that we’re trying to serve or sell to? What do they actually want? And not in kind of the superficial way. But really, if we look to past years with big advertising campaigns, there’s always an emotional draw. And that’s what people buy into. It’s not always about the product itself.

So yeah, I think just seeing that come back into the discussion is great. And yeah, I’m also curious, you know, just as we’re starting to wrap up the episode, what are some of your personal and professional goals going into 2025 that you want to put out into the ether? I’d love to hear about it.

Jenise Uehara:
You know, no, no, this is great.

Andrew Clark:
Not to put you on the spot or anything.

Jenise Uehara:
Gosh. Okay. Okay. So there’s two things.

Jenise Uehara:
And they come back to, you know, they come back to AI and they come back to being connected.

So my team is 100% remote, and we’ve got folks in seven time zones in six countries, or maybe vice versa, I don’t remember anymore.

About a third of them I’ve never met in person. Yeah, and I know them. They know me, and because we’re doing this all day on Slack and all the things.

Andrew Clark:
Sure.

Jenise Uehara:
So, there’s something about knowing how tall somebody is.

When you can hug somebody, when you can say, “Hey, let’s go to lunch.” Spending time with someone in person, again, coming back to human connection, you cannot replicate that.

AI is not going to help you there. It can facilitate you getting there and being able to be with that person in real time and in person.

Andrew Clark:
Yeah.

Jenise Uehara:
But we’re not going to overcome eons of human evolution. This is what we’re wired for. Our lizard brain is wired for being able to look somebody in the eye. That does something chemically to us. So, I would like my team to get together more, whether it’s regional get-togethers or at a conference. We started to do a bit of that last year.

But getting folks together in person to make that final connection—people that I feel like I know really well and have thought, “I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.” And then when I finally met them in person, I thought, “Oh, okay, this is different.” So having that experience, for more of my team to get together to do so, would be fantastic.

The second thing is going to phase two on the adoption of AI, top-down at a systems level. What more can we do within the systems that we have that can replace… You know, the thing I said to my team was, “Look, if any of you are regularly copying and pasting things, especially in spreadsheets, we should be beyond that by now conceptually. That should not be a thing.”

And it doesn’t, I mean, at this point, it doesn’t even have to be AI.

But what can we start to use AI for more internally, again, from a top-down systems approach and also at the individual level—writers, editors, designers, back office, finance, operations?

There’s more that we can do with AI in developing our own sophistication, which I think is going to be key. I tell them, whether you keep working for me or not, we’re not going to be together forever, and eventually, you’re going to be out there, and they are going to ask you, depending on when…

Andrew Clark:
Right.

Jenise Uehara:
What’s your comfort level and expertise when it comes to AI? How do you use it in your day-to-day? What are you familiar with? Which systems? Which, you know, pick your poison. But you’re going to need to develop that, and I encourage you to develop that in-house.

Andrew Clark:
Yeah. Bye.

Jenise Uehara:
So that’s part of my plans for 2025.

Andrew Clark:
Well, again, I think those are incredible goals, and thank you for sharing them, Jenise. And just as we’re wrapping up, I want to ask, so, you know, where should people look to connect with you if they want to?

Jenise Uehara:
LinkedIn.

Jenise Uehara:

Andrew Clark:
Thank you, Jenise, for your time! I’m wishing you and the ESEJ team lots of success this year and we’re all here for the ride. So it’s going to be great.

Jenise Uehara:
Thank you, Andrew. This was so much fun. It went by like that. And a big thank you to the CallTrackingMetrics team as well.
I really appreciate you having me on. I’m so honored to be your first guest back.Andrew Clark:
Well, thank you. And thank you to all of our listeners. You can expect more regular episodes coming out this year. We’re back on a monthly cadence. So until the next episode, have a great one, and we’ll speak to you then.