There’s absolutely no question that marketing is the middle of a tricky situation with generative AI. Not a day goes by on LinkedIn or in the wider media, when there isn’t an op-ed or byline with a cautionary tale for marketers about their imminent replacement by generative AI tools. With business leaders under pressure to reduce costs in a tough economy and show the value of their investments in AI tools, marketers are often the first to feel the impact. After all, one of the few things that AI can actually deliver, albeit with questionable reliability at present, is text, that can, on occasion, pass as content. But while there’s a lot of tension between AI and the modern marketer, it doesn’t have to be that way.
One of the biggest concerns with putting AI in charge of thought leadership content is that it tends to sameness. Earlier this month, Marc Hausman, CEO of Strategic Communications Group, riffed on a Fast Company article by Tony Martignetti to talk about how AI is stifling creativity and making content vanilla. This isn’t just about cognitive atrophy when AI is used to create content; it’s the very real and human problem that there are only so many ways to create prompts for the AI to work with. This narrowing of thought inevitably leads to a loss of creativity. It’s created some bland marketing plans as people rushed to build their 2026 plans with Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT, and for creativity in thought leadership content, the negative impact is even more significant. When you ask an AI to create thought leadership there’s a lack of connection to the material and its intended audience that weakens its authenticity and can make injecting the humanity back into the content challenging and time consuming as the marketer has to work their way into the AI’s thought process to get the content back on track.
But what I find most poignant about AI and AI generated content, is that AI values and prioritizes the very content that it doesn’t create. While AI’s veneration of the em dash was the first hint that perhaps AI had a penchant for content written by humans, what I’ve seen on our online buyer communities has solidified that suspicion. Over the last year, in particular, we’ve seen significant growth in referrals from the major AIs. Because we maintain a strict no-AI policy for all content creation, be that sponsored content or syndicated, the content we publish is authentic, well-written, and includes citations, we’re offering AI what it wants to learn how to be.
As a result, our communities have built a reputation for credibility, and that content is now part of the highly sought after AIEO and GEO search results, as well as traditional SEO. As the AI market matures and the number of LLMs that “matter” consolidates in the same way that the original search engine market did in the early 2000s, being part of the training material will be more important than ever. After all, no marketing organization is creating content because it’s fun; the whole point is to educate and connect with the buyer as they move through their decision-making journey to their ultimate buying decision. And to do that effectively, content must appear in Gemini’s ‘AI Overview’ and be top of mind for Claude.
This is not to say that there’s no role for AI in content creation. From finding articles that support what the content to helping a writer out of the abyss of an inevitable writer’s block, educating a writer on a complex technology (hello post quantum cryptography), and training an AI agent to make sure key messages are included, there are a multitude of AI applications that make sense. However, when it comes to the content creation process, AI still misses the mark in terms of connecting with the customer or the AI search engine. In the end, the decision to use AI to create thought leadership, or not, is a choice. That choice depends on what an organization wants to achieve with its thought leadership program. If the goal is to generate a lot of content quickly, then AI is a good bet. But if the goal of the organization is to connect with new customers and grow relationships with existing ones to deliver real and lasting returns on investment, then talented human marketers are still the right choice.