Getting Thought Leadership Right in the Age of AI
Does AI spell the death of thought leadership content, or is its coming demise a case of exaggerated rumours? The answer lies in how you approach thought leadership and content strategy in the age of AI.
- Thought leadership is changing in the age of AI
- Thoughtleadership can still be an effective tool for generating contacts and leads
- A clear strategy and correct use of AI are pivotal for success
So, what is the most challenging thing about thought leadership?
Is it the time commitment, which requires more than spending five minutes here and there posting LinkedIn posts every couple of days? Or taking a few days every year to produce the odd white paper?
Is it finding out how to make your voice heard in the deluge of content that is flooding across the internet here in the early stages of the age of AI?
I get it. As someone with almost two decades of experience working with thought leadership (there are words to make you feel old), I have been asking myself the same questions.
My answer (based on continued success) is that yes, thought leadership works. In some ways, it may work better now than ever before.
The key to unlock its full potential is a mix of strategy, skills, and commitment. Get those wrong, and you are just going to be adding more noise to the AI cacophony.
Case study: finding a strategy that delivers
Let us start with a real-world example. More specifically, a project I did with a global consulting firm with more than 70,000 employees.
The goal was to build and scale a thought leadership program to raise brand visibility and position key individuals as experts. Through that approach, we wanted to strengthen engagement with existing and potential clients in high-value sectors like technology, media, and telecoms.
Steps included laying a clear strategy, setting goals, and working closely with the key individuals in each sector. The results were measurable—higher content engagement, new client leads and increased direct outreach. A side note: the strong engagement of key employees helped establish their unique voices and brought extra authenticity to the resulting content.
Other keys to success included a clear strategy from the beginning and committing to a multi-year approach of generating high-quality, research-intensive content. The skills part? Being half-English and half-Danish, I feel uncomfortable talking about that. But whatever I added seems to work.
While you can achieve great results with shorter timelines and other approaches, there are some key, general insights from this project. Before diving into those, it is worth spending a minute acknowledging the changes that AI brings to thought leadership.
How AI changes thought leadership
Whether you like them or loathe them, Google’s new AI Overviews illustrate how search rankings and SEO are changing. If the king of sponsored links is going with AI overviews, effectively sawing parts of its existing business model off at the knees, then think what other changes are afoot for how content is searched, found, and shared.
For thought leadership, the speed at which AI develops content is revolutionary. Put bluntly, anyone can use ChatGPT to generate articles in a matter of seconds. So why spend days or weeks on research, writing, and editing something?
Especially seeing how many companies are leaning heavily into fully AI-generated content.
The specific answer depends on your approach. But a few things should be clear:
- If you want to do thought leadership effectively, you need to find ways of using AI.
- Content that is generic, keyword-stuffed, or clearly AI-generated is likely to become increasingly invisible.
- Reaching your target audiences in the age of AI may require rethinking your approach.
This leads to three questions:
- Why should you still invest in thought leadership
- How can you use AI and still stand out
- How can you best engage your target audiences
Why thought leadership still has value
My argument is that in this new era of AI, real thought leadership—authentic, expert-led, perspective-driven content—is more valuable, not less. Some of the reasons include:
- 86% of decision-makers have been influenced by thought leadership to invite a previously unconsidered company for an RFP process.
- 64% of buyers consider thought leadership content to be a more trustworthy basis for assessing a company’s competencies than traditional marketing materials.
- 75% of decision-makers say that a piece of thought leadership has led them to research a product or service they were not previously considering.
- 50% of consumers say they can spot AI-generated content, with many having negative reactions, including lower trust.
So, what can we learn from the numbers? I think it includes:
- Thought leadership still adds value: In the Age of AI, thought leadership can play a significant role in generating trust and drawing in new business.
- Human insight cannot be faked (yet): Industry experts explaining trends, market shifts, or a product’s value still have more value than trying to use an AI to do something similar.
- Credibility builds interest: The human voice drives real-world trust in a way that AI summaries can’t replicate.
In other words, companies that treat thought leadership as a strategy, not a box-ticking exercise, are the ones that will still matter five years from now
AI, strategy, and thought leadership that delivers
Going back to the work I did with the consultancy, and what I have learned from embedding AI into my business and workflows, I would advise you to start thinking about thought leadership based around the following pillars:
- Clear goals: Make sure you know what you want to achieve, how you will seek to achieve it, how to measure progress, and when to potentially make strategic changes.
- Human voices: Rather than having AI generate your tone and full text (I feel we need – perhaps a lot – of hyphens), find ways to ensure that the people you are building as thought leaders get to express their voice and unique points of view.
- Substance: Focus on what you can deliver and what your experts can provide for your target audiences.
- Commitment: Have a clear idea from the earliest stages of the time and resources you are willing to use for the project. Adjust your course along the way, but be comfortable with committing at least six months to test whether or not thought leadership is effective.
- AI integration: Identify where and how to use AI. The goal is to speed up steps in the process without losing focus on human insight and voice.
To add a related observation here: many times, companies will use AI in a bottom-up approach, which I see generating sub-optimal results.
By this, I mean asking AI to “produce an article about X,” or “write a LinkedIn post about Y.” The results are often generic and increasingly turn audiences away.
Instead, I recommend using a top-down approach. The finer points of how is a subject that I advise companies on and will come back to in later articles.
Photo credits:
- Headline photo by Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash
- 1st in-article photo by Jason Dent on Unsplash
- 2nd in-article photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash