For B2B companies, especially professional services firms, senior leaders are the best salespeople and evangelists. Clients want to know that the experts they hire understand their industry, can diagnose their challenges, and offer solutions that will help win them new business and bolster their brand reputation. 

For content marketing agencies like ours, translating the insights of these experts into compelling thought leadership requires a few ingredients: 

• A high level of expertise and knowledge of the industry
• Familiarity with the audience, including where they get their information and in what format
• The context to articulate a call to action or prescriptions that offer something of value

Checking all of these boxes takes work, thought, rigor, and iteration with senior leaders. 

The development process for thought leadership is designed to produce something that stands out and pushes the conversation forward. It also ensures that when senior partners use this material to open a door, they are able to go deeper into the material.

From our end, this process takes a unique set of skills: storytelling, content strategy, collaboration, translation, and sometimes hostage negotiation. Gen AI can’t do that on its own effectively. It still needs an expert at the helm.

LEFF’s AI pledge

We will not take shortcuts or skip the hard work and heavy lifting required to produce top-tier thought leadership. This means that we pledge the following to our clients:

• We will never put your proprietary data and insights into LLMs.
• We won’t use AI to create your content—not for writing, not for editing, not for design.
• We will bring you new ideas from our experts, who have decades of experience working with global professional services firms and Fortune 500 companies.

Why do we restrict our use of AI?

Today, senior executives are putting tremendous pressure on their people to use AI as much as possible because they have been told these tools will allow employees to rapidly produce more content, more cheaply. They aren’t stopping to question whether generating increasing volumes of content furthers their goals or how AI affects the process.

While AI has been trained on excellent writing, its output is a fast track to average. From an editorial standpoint, it’s possible to dramatically reshape an AI-generated first draft, but it typically takes so much time that it cancels out any savings provided by the tools. In addition, the task is made more difficult when teams have become accustomed to the initial narrative structure. It limits their vision for how the insights could be presented and what “better” could look like. That leaves editors on cleanup duty, painting around the edges to turn a solid C into a B minus. 

We’ve been in that position more frequently of late. Increasingly, author teams come to us with a draft they feel is 90 percent of the way there: “It’s ready to publish. Just give it a once-over.” Commonly, we dig in only to discover incomprehensible paragraphs, repetition of terms and ideas, somnambulant structure, a lack of detail in critical places, and, most important, an absence of insights that truly jump off the page.

What’s more, LLMs fall well short of the authoritative thought leadership and content tailored to specific audiences, such as the C-suite and the decision-makers who will engage your company. These executives rely on thought leadership to address the issues they’re facing. So the more distinctive and specific your content is, the better. 

How we deploy AI

AI tools can support thought leadership in targeted ways (see our recent report on gen AI use cases in content creation). Not for all tasks, but for ones that LLMs are geared for. We’ve conducted experiments and put in the work to understand these tools. In our experience, they are effective to support the following tasks: 

// Educate: Research topics and help surface trends or competitive insights.

// Automate: Replace manual, repetitive tasks.

// Accelerate: Streamline processes that cannot be fully automated.

// Elevate: Improve the quality of the final product.

Stand out rather than blend in

Yet we see companies outsourcing the vital work of analysis and thought to tools that create average. Think of AI tools as a machine that flattens the hills, straightens the curves, and renders even the most arresting, provocative, counterintuitive insights bland. Now think of your senior leaders—the keepers of the intellectual property, your organization’s best ambassadors, the ones who seem like the most engaging, articulate, compelling people in a given room—and consider how to ensure that magnetism comes through in what you produce. 

The expertise of your senior leaders needs to be matched by thought partners who can engage on your level, challenge your thinking, and then turn your insights into content that makes your prospective clients want to reach out to you.

For that, you need people who are equally seasoned, passionate, interesting, well-read, committed, and determined to tell your story the way it should be told.

If you see the wisdom in this approach, we’d love to partner with you to elevate your content. Contact us to start a conversation.