Whether you love it, hate it or sit somewhere in between, AI has reshaped the way we do business. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have made generating content quicker and easier than ever, and while these tools bring a range of benefits to time-poor businesses, the sheer volume of content being created every day makes it more difficult to be seen and heard.
Faster isn’t always better
We’re now operating in a landscape flooded with content. At the same time, the media industry has faced significant contraction, with more than 15,000 reported journalism redundancies across the UK and US between 2023-2025. This means fewer journalists covering more ground while sifting through hundreds, sometimes thousands, of AI-generated pitches a day.
For businesses seeking coverage, this makes cut-through harder than ever. But it also reflects a broader shift – more content, less time, and growing scrutiny over what and who to trust.
Alongside AI-cluttered inboxes, journalists are even having to contend with AI-generated spokespeople. In January, Press Gazette exposed more than 50 apparently fake ‘experts’ and associated brands that had featured in the British press more than 1,000 times. In a saturated, automated landscape where care, credibility and trust are being tested, authenticity has never mattered more.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t use AI in communications, but businesses stand to gain more when it’s used in the right way. Anyone can prompt a LLM to churn out convincing content on a given topic, but lazily generated copy is often easy to spot and devalues your effort in the first place. Without your input, judgement, and discernment, it’s not really offering anything from you at all.
The human touch
As humans, we naturally gravitate towards genuine, relatable, authentic content. It’s no coincidence that best-performing social media posts are often
the image-led behind-the-scenes ones with colleagues, or that your ‘meet the team’ page is up there with the most visited on your site.
As an individual in business, you have something intrinsically human that no AI can replicate – hard-earned lived experience. It’s this unique first-person perspective that shapes compelling stories, genuine expertise, and pragmatic insight that provides real value and connection with your audience.
People are drawn to people. We see it in the rise of peer-driven platforms like Reddit, where users actively seek real opinions and lived experiences. Research also suggests that human-generated content drives significantly higher engagement (attracting 5.44 times more traffic and 41% longer session durations) and tends to perform better in search rankings than purely AI-written articles.
The best of both worlds
There are numerous ways AI can benefit your business to boost productivity, ideation and creativity, to name a few. But in an age of automation, humanness is a differentiator. Use it to elevate, not replace, your perspective.
Instead of using it to churn out content, collaborate with it. Explain what you’re trying to do, provide context, share your perspective, give it specifics, case studies, and nuances. Be thorough in discernment and editing, and don’t be afraid to question its methodology, assumptions, or sources.
The businesses that stand out in the AI age will be the ones producing the most meaningful content, grounded in real experience, shaped by human judgement, and delivered with authenticity.
Written by Lottie Buckley, B2B PR consultant and copywriter.