AI is becoming part of everyday practice for many firms and corporates, and there’s plenty being written about how firms should adopt AI (Alistair Marshall recently explored this in the professional services space here).
What’s discussed less is what happens when everyone adopts it, especially across tasks such as drafting, research, and comms, which is where many firms are experimenting.
Here’s the question I’d ask if I were sitting in your boardroom right now:
“If everyone now looks good on paper, how are you going to stand out?”
Most firms don’t know the answer (or there’s a long pause).
“Expertise”
“Service”
“Speed”
“Quality”
But here’s the issue. Many firms now look like that.
AI has made this sameness worse because everyone has access to the same writing tools.
Clients and stakeholders judge what you present them with. They read your website, look at your capability statements, your About pages and bios. If everyone is now ‘good’, standing out becomes harder - not easier.
So what’s the solution? It’s not ‘more content’ or ‘better content’. It’s clearer positioning, expressed properly.
A Quick Test
Here’s a quick test to see if you are being clear enough in the age of AI. Take a look at your own communications.
Your website, blogs, newsletters, capability statements, About page and bios.
Do you sound truly different from the firm next door? Or could your copy sit comfortably on their site, too?
Read your last three external pieces side by side.
Do they consistently reinforce and clearly show how you approach your work, what you’re known for, and where your expertise genuinely sits? Or do they sound impressive but interchangeable with any other firm?
If you’re not sure, there’s work to do. When positioning isn’t clear, credibility suffers. Not because you lack capability, but because it isn’t obvious from what people see.
What You Need to Do Now
AI can improve how something is written and you can prompt it as much as you like.
But it can’t decide what should be said in the first place or invent that for you.
When I’m brought in to help with message consistency, I start by drilling into what a business can say that no one else can. Its people, culture and results. The specifics that matter.
That starts in two places: your boilerplate and your tone of voice (I’ll tackle both of these in more detail in upcoming articles).
Your boilerplate is the short, standard description of who you are and what you do that everyone in your firm should be pulling from and referring to. If that isn’t distinctive, everything built from it won’t be either.
Your tone of voice is how your firm sounds across channels and contributors. If that changes depending on who is writing, you won’t feel like one organisation. You’ll feel like several. And that’s confusing to clients.
The Next Step
If you’re reading this and thinking, “we probably need to look at this,” you’re probably right.
It does take time. It means asking harder questions, challenging language you’ve used for years, and deciding clearly what you actually want to be known for - and being specific about it.
Because if you’re using AI to move faster, you need to be confident you’re moving in the right direction. AI will happily produce more of what you give it.
Whether that’s something distinctive - or more of the same as everyone else - is up to you.
I work with large corporates and professional firms to get positioning clear and consistent - internally and externally - so their communications reflect what makes them different.
If that’s work your firm needs to address, let’s have a conversation about it.