When Should Professional Services Firms Trust AI Content in their Marketing?

by Jan 15, 2025Authentic Marketing, Marketing

When Should Professional Services Firms Trust AI Content in their Marketing?

by | Jan 15, 2025

I recently had a conversation with our creative team about AI content generation that made me think about what we risk losing in B2B marketing. While AI offers powerful capabilities, it threatens to strip away the very things that make our brands remarkable: authenticity, point of view, and genuine human connection.

Let me be direct: AI won’t write your next great blog post, craft your remarkable brand story, or build lasting relationships with your clients. Here’s why.

The False Promise of AI Content Generation

AI content tools promise to solve your content creation challenges. Need a blog post? A social update? Website copy? Just input a few keywords, and seconds later you have seemingly professional content ready to publish.

But this approach fundamentally misunderstands what makes content valuable to your audience. B2B buyers don’t want generic, derivative content that reads like every other article in their industry. They want insights that reflect real expertise, experience, and perspective.

I’ve tested these AI tools extensively, and while they can string together grammatically correct sentences about any topic, they consistently produce bland, surface-level content that lacks:

  • Original insights drawn from actual experience
  • Authentic voice and personality
  • Specific point of view on industry challenges
  • Nuanced understanding of your audience’s context
  • Real stories and examples that resonate

Think about the last time you read an article that made you stop, think, and prompted you to share it. That article probably offered a fresh perspective or challenged your assumptions. AI content, by its nature, can” do this. It can only remix existing content in new ways, creating an echo chamber of increasingly common ideas.

The Hidden Cost of AI Content

When you automate your content creation, you sacrifice more than just quality. You risk losing:

  • Your brand identity: Every piece of AI-generated content dilutes your brand’s unique voice and perspective. B2B companies succeed by standing out, not blending in.
  • Client trust: Professionals can spot AI-generated content, just like they can spot stock photos. Using AI as a shortcut signals to clients that you don’t value their time enough to share real insights.
  • Market distinctiveness: Without a clear point of view, you become indistinguishable from competitors. AI content homogenizes your message into what everyone else is already saying and creates the perception you are a commodity.

We are beginning to develop an ability to spot AI content whether it be words, images or videos … and we are training ourselves to ignore it. People, including your customers, are looking for authentic human connection and they will penalize you and your brand for trying to pass off AI-generated content as if it were actually you.

A Better Approach to Content Creation

If you have developed a dependence on AI to generate your content, you probably already feel a loss of creative capacity. Using AI like this will do to your brand what regularly eating fast food will do to your body.

I am not saying you should not use AI. I am encouraging you to use it intelligently in a way that leverages its capabilities while preserving authenticity and originality in your brand communications.

Here are five tips that will serve as guard rails to keep your AI content creation efforts from driving your brand communications off a cliff:

  1. Start with your experiences: Begin with your team’s actual insights, challenges you’ve solved, and lessons you’ve learned. What perspective can you share that others can’t?
  2. Use AI as a research assistant: Ask AI to explore different angles, suggest related topics, or identify gaps in your thinking. But treat these as starting points, not final products.
  3. Write with a person in mind: Picture a specific client as you write. What questions do they ask in meetings? What keeps them up at night? What would actually help them do their job better?
  4. Add specific examples: Include real stories, data from your experience, and concrete examples that demonstrate your expertise. These details make content credible, useful and authentic.
  5. Edit for voice and perspective: Ensure your content reflects your brand’s personality and point of view. This might mean being more technical, more conversational, or more direct – whatever aligns with your brand.

The Future of B2B Marketing Content

Generative AI capabilities will doubtlessly improve, but they won’t replace the need for authentic, human-centered content. If anything, as AI-generated content proliferates, original thinking and genuine expertise will become more valuable.

Your clients don’t want content that could have been written by anyone (or anything). They want to hear from you – your experiences, your insights, your perspective on their challenges.

The choice isn’t whether to use AI, but how to use it while maintaining what makes your brand remarkable. Use AI to support and enhance your content creation process, not replace the human elements that make your marketing authentic.

The difference between using AI to create content that sucks versus AI content that shines is the thought and effort you put into the process. Invest meaningful time, thought and effort – whether while collaborating with your team or with AI tools – and you’ll produce better results.

This approach takes more time and effort than simply letting AI generate your content. But it also creates the kind of marketing that actually builds the remarkable brands with which people want to be associated. And isn’t that the point?

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