AI made content fast. It also made it forgettable...
Noticed it? Everybody’s publishing at full tilt but it all looks dead behind the eyes.
No surprise. Salesforce found 71% of marketers already use generative AI in their workflows. Adobe says 81% believe generative AI is fundamentally changing how marketing work gets done.
And it all moved stupidly fast.
Generative AI went from experimental toy to baked-in marketing workflow in the space of five minutes. McKinsey reckons the technology could soon automate up to 70% of employee time across marketing, sales and customer operations.
You can feel it everywhere. The blogs ship faster and the nurture sequences get longer. LinkedIn (once merely an unbearable corner of professional Hell, now just the same but even more) is a wall of regurgitated ‘hot takes’ that all sound like they were assembled by the haunted content goblin living inside ChatGPT.
Volume won. We’re all scaling output. Everybody’s building ‘thought leadership engines’. And underneath all the workflow diagrams and agentic workflow-of the-future enthusiasm, loads of scaling B2B companies are quietly dealing with the same problem.
Everything’s starting to sound the fucking same.
Technically fine. Spiritually dead.
Most AI-assisted B2B content isn’t terrible. That’s the weird (and annoying) part.
It’s clear enough, structured enough, optimised enough. The grammar’s fine. The SEO boxes are ticked and the CTA’s in roughly the right place. And yet somehow none of it lands.
Read three SaaS landing pages in a row these days, and your brain starts leaking out your ears. The tone converges. The phrasing converges. Even the ‘bold POV’ thought leadership starts sounding suspiciously similar once you’ve seen enough of it. Everybody’s differentiating in exactly the same voice.
Meanwhile buyers are consuming more content than ever before. Gartner research suggests B2B buyers now spend only a tiny fraction of their buying journey actually talking to suppliers directly. Most of the process happens independently through research and peer validation and digital content.
That means your content is doing more of the selling than ever. Problem is, buyers are getting weirdly good at spotting vanilla.
The AI smell is real
Most buyers won’t say:
“Ah yes, this paragraph was likely assembled using probabilistic language generation models.”
They’ll just quietly click out.
Because people can feel when nobody really meant what they’re reading.
That’s the bit a lot of AI chatter misses. The issue isn’t accuracy. AI is (quite) often technically accurate. The issue is emotional flatness. There’s no texture, no specificity, not enough of that ‘lived-in’ quality or the sense that somebody with skin in the game sat down and tried to communicate something real.
Everything starts sounding polished, sensible and completely interchangeable. The uncanny valley is now littered with whitepapers.
Edelman’s Trust Barometer found only 32% of people trust AI-generated information. That’s not a big number. And it means most buyers (your buyers) don’t remember technically competent content. They remember the stuff that sounds human enough to survive the torrents of slop.
AI has commoditised average content
AI workflows aren’t going away and nor should they. A lot of work is boring, repetitive arse, and I say adios to the automatable.
Modern, competitive marketing teams will need the workflows. And nobody sensible is arguing your marketing team should go back to lovingly handcrafting every nurture email like it’s a medieval manuscript.
The teams moving fastest right now are absolutely using:
- AI-assisted workflows
- agentic research
- automated production systems
- synthetic draft generation
- repurposing engines
- multi-channel content ops
They’d be bonkers not to.
The AI content problem starts when nobody’s steering the thing editorially. Especially when every AI startup, cybersecurity platform and workflow SaaS company is using roughly the same prompts, the same structures and the same recycled LinkedIn playbook. You don’t win attention by publishing more beige.
The new bottleneck is editorial judgement
A few years ago, the bottleneck was production. Now the bottleneck is perspective. Specificity, credibility, taste, the discerning eye, the narrative instinct. Knowing when a sentence sounds like bullshit.
In other words, editorial judgement. Exactly the thing AI still struggles to fake convincingly.
The strongest B2B content right now usually has at least one of these:
- a real opinion
- an observed truth
- language that sounds lived-in
- proof that survives serious scrutiny
- a point of view somebody might disagree with
- phrasing that makes a tired buyer stop scrolling for even half a second
Buyers are getting weirdly good at spotting vanilla. That’s becoming a serious problem for teams producing huge volumes of AI-assisted content without enough editorial judgement layered over the top.
Because AI is brilliant at producing competent averages. More beige. Vanilla.
Your editor becomes the vanilla killer.
That’s why experienced editorial people are more valuable now. Somebody still needs to stop the content turning into a giant pile of spiritually dead sludge.
What spiritually dead content looks like in the wild
You’ve seen it. The thought leadership post nobody shares or the case study sales quietly stops sending. The homepage rewrite that technically says all the right things but somehow makes the product sound less interesting. Blows my mind.
The founder post with six rocket ship emojis and absolutely no observable human experience anywhere inside it.
The AI-generated nurture sequence that reads like it was assembled by committee. The webinar promo that sounds exactly like the other seven webinar promos in your inbox.None of it’s catastrophic individually but together it creates a much bigger problem.
Buyers stop remembering who said what. Then they stop caring.
The teams standing out now aren’t the teams publishing the most
They’re the teams producing content with:
- a sharper point of view
- stronger editorial control
- more specificity
- more humanity
- more commercial instinct
- more courage to sound slightly different
The advantage no longer sits with whoever can publish the fastest, it sits with whoever can still sound like a person worth listening to after the AI tools have done the first draft..
That’s a different skillset entirely. And it matters now more than ever before.