Saying it plainly

A working theory, still in progress: business writing lost the ability to make a point somewhere between the mission statement and the quarterly update. It got worse the day generative AI arrived.

Here is what happened. The tools that were supposed to make everyone a better writer made everyone the same writer. Feed a prompt to a language model and it returns the most probable arrangement of words. Probable means average. Average means what everyone else is already saying. So an entire industry started sounding like one slightly bored voice, and the people using these tools couldn't hear it, because the output looked clean and finished and arrived in seconds.

There is research on this now. A study of restaurants in Milan tracked what happened to their marketing when AI tools were available versus restricted. With access to the tools, their content grew measurably more similar to each other. Same words, same structure, same rhythm. When access was cut off, two things happened: the writing became more distinct, and customer engagement went up. Likes rose by roughly three and a half percent. The sameness wasn't just aesthetically dull. It cost them attention.

That should frighten anyone in this business, because attention is the only thing we sell.

I notice it most in bios. I spent years as a journalist, on the receiving end of the pitches and profiles that agencies send when they want their client interviewed. After enough of them, you start to see it. The bios are interchangeable. You could swap the names between two of them and not notice. They read as if everyone copied off the same exam. Accomplished leader. Proven track record. Passionate about driving impact. Words that have been used so many times they've stopped meaning anything at all.

Here is the part that should bother an agency most. When a bio reads like every other bio, the journalist loses interest in the person behind it. Not the pitch. The person. And the agency that sent it quietly stops getting calls back, because nobody returns to a source that wastes their time. Worst of all is when the interview happens anyway and the spokesperson turns out to be genuinely brilliant. Sharp, original, worth the whole page. Which means the agency had something rare and introduced it badly. They buried the very person they were paid to elevate.

Good people need good agencies. That sentence is most of what I believe about this job.

The reason bios come out identical is that most of them are built from the wrong material. An agency pulls the CV, scrapes what's already online, runs it through a tool, and produces a summary of summaries. Of course it sounds like everyone else. It was assembled from the same public scraps everyone else is working from. There is no person in it. There is only a record of a person.

We do it the other way around. A bio should never be written from a CV. It should be written from the human. That means a conversation, an actual interview, where the goal is to understand the personality and not just the specialty. What does this person actually think. How do they talk when they're not performing. What's the thing they'd say if you took the corporate filter off. That is where a real profile lives, and you cannot scrape it, because it isn't published anywhere yet.

When we can, we push the high-profile people to write their own. Not because it's easier for us. It's harder. But a profile someone wrote in their own voice carries an authority that no agency prose ever will, and readers feel the difference even when they can't name it.

None of this is an argument against AI. I use it every day, and so does everyone good. It is excellent at the work around the writing. Finding a fact you're missing. Tracking down a source. Organizing a mess of notes into something you can move through. Summarizing a forty-page report so you can find the one number that matters. Checking a claim before it goes out the door. That is real, and it makes the work faster and better.

What it cannot do is be the final writer. The moment you let the machine produce the words that go out under your name, you've handed your voice to the most average version of itself. The judgment, the angle, the decision about which true sentence to build everything around, that has to stay human. The tool does the legwork. The person does the writing.

The plainest sentence in a press release is almost always the truest one. The line that survived three rounds of stakeholder edits because nobody could think of a way to soften it without lying. That is the line your reader will remember. Find it, and put the whole weight of the work behind it.