Thought Leadership is Dead. Long Live Thought Leadership.

Artificial intelligence may one day transform everything—but it’s already underway in content marketing.

When ChatGPT and similar AI tools capable of writing on command first began appearing several years ago, they looked like a content marketer’s best friend. Requiring nothing more than a small fee, simple learning curve, and minimal time investment, these tools could almost single-handedly orchestrate a content strategy on a massive scale. The ‘promise’ was that marketers no longer needed to hire SEO strategists, content writers, or social media publishers—AI could replace all that, doing it better than before at a fraction of the cost.

It seemed too good to be true. Then the reality set in.

The rude awakening happening across content marketing is that when everyone has AI producing content, no one has an advantage. In fact, the noise is becoming deafening. If company A writes about something, company B can instantly do the same. And if company B produces 100 articles, company A can spin up 200 almost as easily. As a result, the content strategies many companies have relied on for years, based around cultivating a knowledge base and capturing SEO traffic, are rapidly delivering diminishing returns. The emphasis used to be on quantity, the more content the better. But today’s search algorithms are starting to rank for quality, instead, and the quality of AI content isn’t getting any better now that models are being trained on text written by other AI, not real people.

That’s the bad news. But the fact that content production has become an arms race has a silver lining, too. AI has leveled the playing field, so to speak, by making volume less important than value. Companies that once struggled to stand out with their content now have a golden opportunity to differentiate their brand and product.

Better yet, they have a clear strategy to follow.

Thought Leadership in the Age of AI

The term “thought leadership” has typically been applied to content considered a step or two above the ordinary. As the name implies, this type of content leads how others think, presenting ideas and narratives that grab attention, gain traction, and (ideally) diffuse throughout the professional discourse. Buzzy, innovative, influential concepts come from somewhere: thought leadership.

Marketers are guilty of abusing the “thought leadership” label to sell average content as something exceptional, but true examples of thought leadership content usually have (at least) one of these features:

• Elite Authorship: The content comes from an executive, influencer, industry heavyweight, or anyone else seen to have personal experiences or exciting perspectives worth sharing with others. These personal perspectives are exactly what AI doesn’t have.
• Valuable Information: The content contains deep expertise, innovative insights, original research, or creative contributions that aren’t available anywhere else.
• Premium Reach: The content gets published in third-party outlets—reputable business journals, trade magazine, and/or relevant podcasts—that lend it greater legitimacy while reaching audiences the company blog does not.

This used to characterize thought leadership content. But now that AI has all but eliminated the ability to compete using educational and informational content (i.e. “subject matter 101” with no unique angle), marketing teams must up their game to differentiate their company from the rest. Generic content isn’t enough anymore. Marketing teams must aim for the upper-echelons of content and nowhere else.

Thought leadership as we know it is over. Not because it’s irrelevant, but because it’s everything.

Producing Thought Leadership at Scale

Understanding the importance of thought leadership to a post-AI content strategy is an important first step that companies need to be explicit and intentional about—but all the hard work comes afterwards. Because unlike the content of the past, producing more isn’t as simple as switching the strategy or even upping the budget.

In fact, thought leadership content is difficult, sometimes even impossible to scale for some unique reasons.

Consider the process for creating just one piece of thought leadership content (blog, guest article, video, LinkedIn post, etc.). It begins with the hardest part of all: finding a topic to pursue that’s new, relevant, and valuable. That’s followed by an interview with the assigned “thought leader” that must succeed at getting interesting, on-point information out of their minds. Next, it takes a quality writer to not only get that information into a written draft but also craft a compelling and topical narrative around it that speaks to the right audience. Finally, after edits, the piece needs to be placed and/or published along with a plan for distribution and attribution.

It takes A LOT to produce great thought leadership content, which explains why in the past world of content it was the exception and not the rule.

But now that equation has flipped. As AI makes “ordinary” content increasingly irrelevant while simultaneously increasing demand for stories with a clear “human” angle, thought leadership content is how companies will attract audiences, build reputations, and streamline deals. Which means one piece of content is just the start. It will take large quantities of thought leadership released on a consistent basis from here into the foreseeable future—so all the steps outlined above repeated over and over again.

Marketing teams must nonetheless find ways to scale thought leadership if their content has any hope of standing out. That said, the future of content doesn’t mean abandoning educational and information content, nor should AI be avoided entirely. This kind of content still has an important role to play in the buyer’s journey and in SEO, and with the right combination of AI speed and scale plus human creativity and context, marketers can put a unique spin on ordinary content that makes it feel fresh compared to the competition.

Opportunities for content marketing are greater than ever…but so are expectations. Now companies must catch up.

Strategic companies are enlisting marketing partners like Magnetude Consulting that have proven strategies for scaling thought leadership, upgrading content operations, and leveraging AI selectively to drive innovation and efficiency while maintaining the critical human element. Don’t let your content go stale. Contact us to make it more potent than ever.