When I started my career, I was a proud idealist. Surely I already knew exactly what great communications looked like, and what people really wanted to see and read? You won't be surprised that this purist stance didn't last once it collided with a market that couldn't care less what I personally thought.
I had to become much more pragmatic, focusing first on what worked commercially. But it was important not to reject creative standards completely. Even working at pace in startups, I regularly battled with my managers and founders, pushing for more thinking time, just one last redraft, when delivering work.
I feel good about the resistance I put up then. Spending more time reworking stuff and thinking hard did let me create clearer communications. In turn, this helped the companies I worked for make higher-quality arguments and convince more buyers to choose us. The trade-off was fairly clear: more time thinking = better work = more revenue.
Only now, companies have a different cost-benefit analysis to make. AI can give you written communications that are usually a bit 'meh', but which are delivered near-instantly. That is a very seductive proposition for senior leaders who want everything done yesterday. (And for now, of course, token costs still compare favourably with copywriters' hourly rates).
Now, I am not a reflexive 'never AI' person, but I do have strong opinions about when AI looks and feels OK, and when it just doesn't. Take the absurd banana at the top of this page. It serves no function, but (hopefully) its frankly odd size and immediacy jars you just enough to get you reading. It's, I think, a decent use of AI that feels premium.
It helps that other Narratives Work assets (like our website and logo) are hand-crafted and painstakingly designed by professionals from a very good London agency. Working out what needs the human touch, and where you can safely outsource certain assets to AI, is a fundamental skill for content and communications professionals. Personally I like the contrast, although I'm sure not everyone will agree. I think it works for us, for now.
'For us, for now': the twenty-something idealist in me wouldn't necessarily have liked the world-weary pragmatism of that phrase, but I think it's a decent heuristic for marketers and business communicators grappling with how far to embed AI into their workflows and processes.
Anti-idealism and 'for us, for now'
'Does it work for us? Does it work for now?' are, in fact, two pretty good questions that can help commercial leaders determine how far their companies should rely on AI in their marketing and written communications.
Ask yourself: when we read back through AI-generated ad copy, press release drafts, customer service chat transcripts, etc, do we feel that those outputs intuitively fit our brand voice? Or do we get a sneaky feeling that it's just not the right tone? Are customers and potential buyers happy, or are they picking up on changes in the way you're talking? (A bit like a referee trying to avoid any headline-grabbing howlers, the best-case outcome for AI content right now is that it goes entirely unnoticed.)
And, especially pertinent to fast-growing tech companies: are we facing hurdles or scaling challenges that make AI especially compelling as a solution for our present content and communication problems? (You might be finding it really hard to hire a great copywriter, for instance, or facing a huge push to get hundreds of new ad creatives completed this week).
If the answer to both of these questions is yes, it's likely that leveraging AI will, on balance, make sense for you, either as a core pillar of the content and communications function or, pragmatically, as a short-term solution to those operational bottlenecks. Yes, even if you are concerned that your marketing might lose that ineffable individuality and distinctiveness your content and comms teams have fought to retain.
Is a 'for us, for now' content and communication strategy anti-idealism? Well, maybe. But when a massive global trend is playing out in front of us, I tend to be wary of the companies that find themselves at either end of the bell curve on AI adoption. Total antipathy to AI is not the answer, but neither is a quasi-religious devotion to AI as the only way to produce the content you need.
