The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on marketing has been remarkable, and it continues to evolve as fast as a Space X rocket orbits the earth. For marketers who are early adopter junkies and feed off of leveraging those peak trends, the juicy new AI feature sets are too tempting to let sit on the shelf. Companies are embracing AI tools at a rapid pace in order to streamline the time-consuming process of content creation. But too much of a good new thing can also be bad, and here’s why.

Companies are being lured into creating massive amounts of – yawn – boring content.

With the easy adoptability of AI, B2B companies have embraced the shortcuts AI technologies offer. They are quickly cranking out their content, and checking off their editorial calendar project tasks with wild abandon. Now they can produce a month’s worth of blog posts, whitepapers, e-books, and social media posts in a fraction of the time. And then do it again! And again! Sadly though, too many companies are relying on these AI tools to do all the heavy lift. As more and more companies jump on the AI bandwagon, our beloved large language models will continue poop out bland and uninspirting content. Companies who are exclusively producing AI-generated content are drowning in mediocrity and drifting further and further from the shores of originality and emotion. Not to mention, some of the AI content is just factually wrong. Talk about a fast track to losing an audience.

Companies need to create content with a distinctive personality and voice to stand out:

It’s basic marketing 101. Consider if company A and B both sell widgets, company A’s dry content drives me to reach for my next cup of coffee, but company B makes me chuckle while I learn about their feature set, or gives me a step-by-step solution that I’m looking for. Which am I more likely to return to? Company B, of course. I spend longer on their website. I dive deeper into their feature pages. I begin to like them. I start to trust them. And as I shortlist my suppliers, Company A gets shuffled lower in the deck while Company B is my little darling, and the one I recommend to my peers. Humans like doing business with humans they enjoy being around. Think of your digital content as an extension of the humans at your company. If people like your content, they’ll consume more of it. For the love of grammarly, don’t let it be boring.

Just like human beings, every company has its unique personality and voice. When companies start producing content that is as interesting to read as an warranty manual, they erode their brand identity and this was true before AI entered the game.

The caveat: AI is evolving quickly. It won’t be all bad forever.

In all fairness to AI, not ALL AI is creating the saltine cracker of the snack world. I am currently beta testing some interesting new AI enhancements that allow you to teach it your brand voice, words you use and words you don’t, infuse wit, graphic elements, etc. It leads me to believe that in no short order we will soon see a distinct separation from average content that free AI content tools create, to a market where efficiency and “authenticity” comes at a much higher price. So does that mean that big budget companies will win the content wars and win the edge on market share? Will those big budgets bring the fun to the sales cycle? Maybe, if you have someone to train the AI. And that leads to a whole new skill set: the AI prompter. Let that sink in and we’ll talk more about that later.