AI Isn’t Ending Thought Leadership. It’s Exposing Who Never Had It
I’ve spent nearly two decades in media and public relations. I’ve helped a fitness chain launch its luxury brand in Canada, branded helicopter and mountaintop influencer class included. I’ve watched a junk-removal company land itself on Oprah and in the New York Times. I’ve advised an online eyewear startup as it sold to an optical giant for hundreds of millions.
But regardless of the industry or scope, as my work has shifted toward executive brand consulting, my clients tend to fall squarely into two categories. The ones who want to be actively involved in shaping their content and online presence, and the ones who’d rather set it and forget it.
Both approaches are valid. Executives are busy and need to do the work, not just talk about it. But with U.S. adults now spending close to eight hours a day with digital media, per eMarketer’s 2025 forecast. How you show up online is, for most people, how you show up at all.
The Harvard Business Review recently ran a piece called “Has AI Ended Thought Leadership?” In it, the author argues the endless stream of polished, confident and frequently hollow insights that are flooding our feeds, is essentially killing the category.
I agree with the sentiment. In a world, where as he puts it “anyone can perform authority, authority itself loses meaning.” But it also opens a real opportunity for executives to break away from the hive mentality and surface the messy, on-the-ground experiences their communities, and content feeds, are starved for. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found 73% of people now expect CEOs to lead trust-brokering in society. Polished AI sludge can’t do that, but executives can.
Let People See Through The Messy
In his HBR piece, John Winsor coins what he calls “thought doership,” a category he says happens in the mess. It’s the work of people running projects with real money, real teams and incomplete information, instead of weighing in from a safe distance. Hands on or hands off, that truth only grows as AI floods the polished surface of content.
What adds real value today shares what good reporters always chased, which is access. Access to the failures, the hard emotions and the resilience it takes to reach a breakthrough. Sprout Social’s 2025 Index found 55% of social users are more likely to trust brands publishing human-generated content, rising to two-thirds among Gen Z and Millennials.
Most clients I work with are cautious about being vulnerable in their content, especially in the beginning of our work together. They’d rather share their wins, or the polished case studies where an outcome supported their core thesis. And, I get it. Managing optics is why they hire an executive brand consultant in the first place. But the learnings that surface during a project that went sideways or a complex problem they’re still working through almost always cuts through the generic noise and earns both credibility and trust faster than any polished case study ever could. Simply because it’s clear they aren’t just talking about it, but they are doing the work.
Without Lived Experience, It’s Just Content
When it comes down to it, war stories, specificity and deep experience will always stand out in a content feed and resonate more deeply than what’s currently trending. It’s why I keep digging into what’s actually happening in my clients’ worlds, regardless of how much time they desire to put into their program. Where theory met reality and more often where it didn’t, and what they took from the wins and the wreckage or what they’re still processing is proof of experience and that builds credibility and relatability faster than any polished AI-generated post ever could.
These conversations don’t take more time. They take more honesty. Even an hour a month spent digging into someone’s personal experiences produces better content than the internet’s faux expertise could ever match.
The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report found that nearly 60% of decision-makers said a single piece of thought leadership directly led them to award business to an organization, and you can bet the pieces that resonated weren’t just regurgitating the hive mentality around an oversaturated topic.
Performative Content Costs More Than It Earns
Performative content might hit the keywords. It might even generate leads or a speaking slot. But content that lacks lived depth never translates into real executive brand equity. It caters to the moment more than it represents who you are, what you’ve built and how you see your industry.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer reported a 9-point net trust gain for CEOs, while institutional leaders lost ground. People are reaching for human voices, not corporate ones. A personal brand that doesn’t draw on the experiences of the person behind it isn’t personal at all. It’s just another brand.
I’m not saying ignore trends. Hijacking something in the news cycle that genuinely connects to your authority is smart. But chasing trends and regurgitating popular thought patterns is how you fall into the ocean of generic thought leadership the internet is already drowning in.
From my earliest days in J-school, where I learned to interview without leading questions and write without bias, to years of subsequent conversations with everyone from the unhoused addict to the Fortune 50 CEO, one thing has driven my interest in this work—human behavior.
Humans are innately interested in other humans. Some of us have a knack for business or financial modelling, others might be into biohacking or organic farming, but our interest in someone's industry or professional expertise pales beside interest in the human experience.
What someone has lived through, what it taught them, and how it affected them is ultimately what people stop scrolling for because it feeds our innate desire to learn from the world around us and the people within it. All of this is to say, AI hasn’t ended thought leadership, at least not in my opinion. But it is exposing the people who never really had any in the first place.