Thought leadership should be fun, fast, and fearless. You tap into excitement about new ideas and advocate for something better. That’s the mindset behind The Idea Sled. Projects glide forward gracefully. It’s the momentum of commitment. This newsletter shows you how.
Companies seem to be losing their voices in a vague, grey, froggy hoarseness where people don’t sound like themselves.
This frog in our throats comes from an infection—generative AI.
Marketing teams will increasingly consider and adopt Gen AI for all types of marketing content in 2025. From standard corporate social posts to blogs to long-form thought leadership, the lure of low cost and increased scale will draw companies to AI. It’s not only inevitable—it’s fiscally responsible.
For the most perfunctory types of marketing assets, Gen AI simply makes more sense than human writers. For others, companies should be ready to clear their throats to get through the dust and mucus.
The Emerging Opportunity
The rapid adoption of AI also creates a hidden strategic opportunity for innovators to publish challenging ideas conveyed by compelling voices (individual and brand voices). Here’s why.
Gen AI does a serviceable job producing generic content. As companies experiment, most will likely push their use cases beyond the generic. As a result, in many sub-segments of complex B2B such as institutional finance and fintech, a large pack of players will all start to sound nearly the same.
Voices will converge into an undifferentiated AI voice. Companies that also use Gen AI to generate insights will begin to fall into a form of generated groupthink.
This convergence of voices and ideas creates a massive opportunity to stand out. The key is developing a clear brand voice and a differentiated set of branded ideas. It’s about saying the things that you and only you have the standing and power to say.
Clearing Your Throat
Companies that move in the opposite direction of the AI adoption curve can capitalize on this unique moment by doing three things.
- Rigorously codifying brand voice. This process involves more than creating a style guide and a few words or phrases to describe the desired tone. It includes much more detailed analysis of how to communicate and orient language in a way that best serves decision-makers (i.e., buyers).
- Creating a system of ideas. Your brand insights emerge from the problems solved by your products and services. They can be oriented to current situations and emerging trends, but in both cases, they give decision-makers a clearer and more nuanced way of understanding the problems they face and you solve. A systematic approach means taking a detailed prioritized inventory of the specific insights in your organization’s collective wisdom.
- Keeping humans in the lead. Gen AI is not yet up to the task of writing material with a strong, clear voice and point of view. With the current generation of tools, drawing a line that you won’t cross (yet) takes restraint. Where your voice and insight matter, simply don’t give in to the temptation to have AI generate the content. Instead, use it for research and editorial support, but keep humans as the lead thinkers and authors. It is still more efficient for a human to do the work than to undo and rewrite the distorted generic output of Gen AI.
A Competitive Edge
Doing these three things gives you an automatic edge over the pack of competitors who give in to AI too far and too soon. And it produces a wave of memorable, insightful content to surf while your peers get pulled into the undertow.
Does this strategic advantage hold as AI gets better at writing and thinking? My hunch is that we’ll do so for longer than you think.
Most tech adoption paths include at least one significant backlash (e.g., crypto) on their way to the mainstream. Some AI researchers are beginning to discuss cost challenges of as much as $1000 per query and the risks of models collapsing because they run out of original training data. These issues have the potential of holding deeper adoption in check or creating an opposite swing of the pendulum away from AI.
And Then What?
That said, the scenario of more capable AI remains entirely plausible. However, this plausible future implies that having a well-codified voice and system of ideas will still be a competitive advantage. These materials, used by humans in the lead today, will also give you a fast start with materials ready to feed an AI capable of using them.
Your competitors who let Gen AI drive them now will still have catching up to do, lest they remain stuck in generic goop. By contrast, you’ll be ready to go.
The interim approach also means you have practitioners experienced in working with AI by their sides. They have an advantage in working with AI outputs to coax the desired final outcomes into place, today as a supporting tool and tomorrow, perhaps, as a writing companion, able to produce drafts that don’t require complete restructuring and rewriting.
Beyond “Human in the Loop”
Machine learning and AI professionals have used the phrase “human in the loop” for several years. It refers to mechanisms where humans can control and oversee automated outputs rather than simply passing them on to the next phase of the workflow.
But when it comes to a differentiated voice and ideas, we need to do more than keep humans in the loop. Humans need to initiate and shape the process from start to finish rather than coming in after the fact.
This need will persist for many more rounds of Gen AI maturation, even when AIs can more reliably output text or other media following detailed instructions for voice, tone, style of writing, style of thinking, and applying unique thinking.
Once AI masters voices, ideas and thinking produced by AI will remain a commodity for some time until companies develop their own models that can innovate and compete with each other versus the generic output of widely available models. Likely, that sophistication will require crossing the line from generative AI to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), where AIs can more or less think for themselves rather than simply predicting statistically plausible output as they do today.
That future and the role of humans in it remains undefined. For now, companies that thrive on ideas—a description that applies to any sophisticated B2B domain such as institutional finance and fintech—will continue to need to master their own voices. If AI is already starting to make your voice scratchy and same-y this year, don’t forget to clear the frog in your throat.
Three Grace Notes
“Let us not deny that we are occupied by the Homo sapiens, and that we are, like it or not, ourselves sapiens, a figure who, we can all agree, has found himself in crisis. A man whose death drive is in the driver’s seat. H. sapiens needs help. But he doesn’t want help.” —Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake
“But cats understand several key things of which writers’ lives are made: stress, focus, and a lonely persistence in the face of emotional and/or physical torment. All of these are central elements of feline and writerly consciousness and experience; and it’s never surprised me that so many writers have chosen cats as companions.” —Caleb Carr, My Beautiful Monster
“So it was, every teaspoon of sugar that was stirred into a cup or baked into a pudding was haunted by the slave trade and the slaughter of the buffalo. Just as now, into every teaspoon, is mixed the pragmatic nihilism of industrial sugar farming and the death of our place on earth. This is the sweetness that pricks people’s senses and sparkles in a birthday cake and glitters on the tongue. Price guaranteed, delicious, a craving strong as love.” —Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red
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