rewrite this title Two Seconds

I met Amber at HR Tech Europe in Amsterdam. She was twenty-something, four months into her first proper job after university, and she was trying to explain what her company does.

“The problem,” she said, with the calm confidence of someone who had given this answer before, “is that attention is very difficult to hold on to.”

She paused.

“Two seconds and they are gone.”

I found myself nodding, in the way you do when someone says something obvious that you’ve somehow never quite articulated. Two seconds. Less time than it takes to read this sentence. Less time than it takes to decide you don’t want to read this sentence. We are, apparently, operating at the very edge of what the human brain is willing to tolerate before it finds something else to do.

This is not, when you think about it, a particularly flattering portrait of our species. But it is probably an accurate one.

Why More Communication Is Making Things Worse

There is a standard corporate response to the attention problem, and it goes roughly like this: send more. If the newsletter isn’t being read, send it more often. If the email isn’t landing, write a longer one. If the all-hands presentation isn’t engaging anyone, add more slides. The logic is understandable. It is also, more or less completely, wrong.

What organisations tend to do is treat workplace communication as a volume problem when it is actually a relevance problem. Or, more precisely, a humanity problem.

Humans have always paid attention to the same things. Stories. Faces. Conflict. Surprise. A sense that something real is being shared between one person and another. We paid attention to these things around fires, in amphitheatres, in pubs, in cinemas. We never really stopped wanting them. We just built forty years of corporate infrastructure that quietly filtered them out.

The memo replaced the conversation. The intranet replaced the noticeboard. The Zoom replaced the meeting, which had already replaced the walk down the corridor. Each step felt like progress. Each step removed something small and human. And now we find ourselves sending communications that nobody reads, to people who are technically paying attention to their screens but are, in any meaningful sense, somewhere else entirely.

Interactive Visual Storytelling as Applied Psychology

What Amber’s company, Intractive, is doing is not, at its core, a technology story. It is a psychology story. The platform is interactive and visual, yes. It works on any device, embeds anywhere, tracks engagement, and surfaces data. All of that is real and useful. But the underlying premise is older than any of it.

If you want someone to pay attention, you have to give them something worth paying attention to.

The ASML campus tour Amber showed me, built to attract engineers, was vivid and specific. The Dutch police pre-selection tool, designed to filter recruits before they waste anyone’s time, was honest enough to tell people early when they weren’t a good fit. These are not polished corporate productions hiding behind clever software. They are organisations that have decided to be, in some small way, real.

That turns out to be rather rare.

The AI Content Paradox and the Scarcity of Human Attention

There is a timing element here that feels important. We are, at this precise moment in history, producing more content than at any previous point in human existence. AI content tools can generate an article, a newsletter, a product overview, a candidate communication, in seconds. The economics of content creation have effectively collapsed. Volume is no longer a constraint for anyone.

Which means that the thing that was already scarce, genuine human attention, is about to become dramatically scarcer.

In a feed full of generated text, the piece that sounds like a person will stand out. In an inbox full of automated updates, the message with a real face and a real voice will get opened. In a recruitment process where every touchpoint looks the same, the employer who shows you something true about what it actually feels like to work there will attract a different kind of applicant.

This is not a sentimental argument for doing things the old way. It is a fairly straightforward observation about scarcity. When everything is abundant, the rare thing wins.

What This Means for Employee Engagement and Internal Comms

Amber, four months into her career, probably didn’t set out to make a philosophical point. She was at a trade show, trying to sell software. But the problem she described so simply, the two-second window, the drifting attention, the communications that go unread, is one that sits underneath almost every conversation happening in HR, in internal comms, in marketing, and in leadership teams across the world.

We built extraordinary tools for reaching people. We just forgot to say anything worth hearing.

The good news, if there is good news, is that the fix is not especially complicated. It mostly involves remembering what human beings have always responded to. Story. Character. A sense that someone, somewhere, actually meant it.

Two seconds, as it turns out, is long enough. If you use them well.

Intractive is a Netherlands-based interactive visual storytelling platform. Amber Changoer spoke to UC Today at HR Tech Europe 2025.