• by Christophe Jammet , Yesterday

Harvard Business Review recently posed a simple question: “Has AI Ended Thought Leadership?” The piece makes a compelling case that the content machine is broken, with every LinkedIn feed saturated with polished, overconfident, and frequently hollow insight. The diagnosis, while depressing, is exactly right. The conclusion, however, is quite wrong.

Real, substantive thought leadership is now more essential than ever. Getting there, though, requires understanding why the cheap imitation has become so ubiquitous.

For years, the thought leadership category had a credibility problem it couldn't name. Anyone with a decent ghostwriter and a conference circuit could play the role convincingly.

Generative AI certainly didn't introduce that problem, but it certainly did industrialize it. When any competitor can produce a polished white paper on your specialty topic in a few minutes, the old paradigms collapse. A well-written, thoroughly researched white paper once meant weeks or months of effort. Now it takes a few prompts and seconds.

AI slop has become the new clickbait, and audiences are developing similar skepticism toward it. The 2024 Deloitte Connected Consumer Survey found that half of respondents are now more skeptical about the accuracy and reliability of online information than they were the prior year.

The counterintuitive part is that AI can't replicate the very thing that drives trust in the first place. People, including the smart, brainy, patent-holding types, are inconsistent, chaotic, and often a little weird. Those aberrations from uniformity are precisely what make us who we are. Our intricacies are shaped by our own experiences, learnings, dialogues, successes, and spectacular failures. That imprint of lived experience is what separates genuine thought leadership from the uninspired prompt output that festoons our feeds. Efforts to outsource and bypass that component are, in my view, the root cause of the issues the HBR piece describes.

Research from FT Longitude finds that 78% of buyers say intelligent thought leadership increases trust and their likelihood to engage, while 73% warn that poor-quality thought leadership actively damages reputation. The gap between those two outcomes has never been wider, or easier to fall into.

In the face of proliferated slop, actual thought leaders have had to evolve and refocus how they convey expertise. Unique, immersive, and interactive formats create conditions for authentic expression that AI-generated content simply cannot replicate. Podcasts and vlogcasts, unscripted panels, academic debates, and live discourse where ideas get challenged and evolved in real time all become valuable windows into how experts think and how their ideas develop. A great example is IBM's “Mixture of Experts” podcast, which has become a masterclass in expert perspective and discourse. The show works because it brings genuine experts to bear on real, timely developments across the AI and technology landscape. That combination of editorial focus and authentic discourse resonates precisely because it cannot be faked at scale.

Brands that buy into this approach are making a counterintuitive bet: Don't outsource your expertise, go deeper, put the discourse on display, and make sure your content is inarguably human. The ones that don't may be winning the volume game, but they're losing the trust game.  Edelman’s  LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report  discovered  nearly three-quarters of executives trust thought leadership content over traditional marketing collateral, that distinction can drive real commercial outcomes.

The AI slop-ification of low-quality "thought leadership" has, if nothing else, clarified what the real thing actually requires.