Just about all of us are using AI at work, but that doesn’t mean most folks aren’t at least a little bit queasy about using it, what it produces and the long-term ramifications.
We surveyed 205 U.S.-based professional services marketers and leaders to gauge how they’re using AI. While all but 1% tell us they’re using AI to do their jobs, just about everyone had some concerns. Most of them center around the quality of AI produced and how it’s perceived by key audiences.
AI-generated content risks undermining trust in a firm
Marketing professionals, especially those who have significant writing backgrounds, know that the purpose of marketing content in professional services is to build trust. That’s it. Professional services businesses are hired for the quality of their thinking; “thinking” is their product, so demonstrating it in a public arena is the way your firm gets noticed and, ultimately, gets hired.
Colleagues from other disciplines will often think that content is merely something that fills up a page, but filling up a page with vague AI slop doesn’t help achieve the purpose of building trust. In fact, it undermines it.
The marketers we surveyed know this.
- 31% of our respondents said that they’re concerned that AI-generated content is “generic, bland or uninspired.”
- 27% are concerned that content produced with AI maintains their unique brand voice and authenticity.
- 19% worry about brand damage from audiences reacting poorly to AI content.
- 18% expressed concern about content not being high-quality or relevant enough for their audience.
AI-generated content tends to be grammatically correct but lacks the genuine emotion that comes from decades of lived experience in a role; good marketers know that creating an emotional connection is the essence of all their content-oriented efforts. Even in B2B professional services, tapping into emotions is how we get prospective clients to pay attention and consider hiring us.
When we asked the open-ended follow-up question, “What are your biggest fears about AI in marketing?” 26% told us they’re concerned about losing creativity and a sense of human emotion.
“I’m concerned that relying solely on AI to generate marketing content will ignore human sensitivity to emotions and cultural context and lead to negative public opinion in the target market,” said one.
We can’t lose “the human touch that makes brands relatable,” said another.
Mistake-riddled AI content is a concern
We’ve all laughed at some of the absurdities AI has produced. While we all understand that it is improving daily, you’d be a fool to trust it completely.
With marketing departments everywhere under pressure to do more with less, and with many non-marketing executives believing that it makes sense to reduce headcount and have AI do the work, marketing leaders are up at night worrying about the inevitable AI errors that will get them into hot water.
- 32% of our respondents worry that AI will provide inaccurate information.
- 17% expressed concern that content from AI will contain outdated references.
The solution is human oversight. However, that undermines the productivity argument in favor of AI—if you’re spending a big chunk of your time searching for and cleaning up AI-created messes, is AI really helping you get things done?
Our recommendation is to realize what AI is in terms of its “skills”—AI should not be your marketing director or your primary content creator. It’s the most caffeinated junior employee you’ll ever have. It can accomplish a ton of work, but you need to check it, and sometimes you need to challenge its assumptions.
AI content tends to underperform
Whether it’s because Google, LinkedIn and LLM algorithms can decipher what’s created by humans versus what’s created by robots or because human beings sniff out AI content and avoid it, we’ve heard from multiple marketers that AI-generated content tends to underperform in terms of online engagement.
The marketers we surveyed recognize this and are concerned about it: 23% told us they worry about AI content not performing as well as human-generated content.
The solution? Again, it’s human intervention. But we humans need to bring a very skeptical eye to our reviews of content created by AI. It’s almost always better to take the concept as written by AI and rewrite it yourself.
Does that reduce your productivity, or the perception of your productivity? Yes, in terms of pure output. But in terms of outcomes, you’re far better served to maintain strict control of the content your team produces.