67% of global marketers “frequently or always” use AI for content creation. Doesn’t that sound efficient, scalable and speedy? All the words that look good in board papers. All the words that have never, in the history of marketing, actually built a great brand.
AI is brilliant at churning out drafts. But drafts don’t persuade people. They don’t win over risk-averse CFOs, or turn stakeholders into a “yes”. So, if efficiency and expediency get you more drafts, what actually changes minds and behaviour?
A strange world
In Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, a young writer called Tengo is asked to rewrite a strange manuscript called Air Chrysalis, so it has a shot at a major literary prize. The story is extraordinary. It features Little People emerging from the mouth of a dead goat, a girl drawn into a cult, a parallel Tokyo where two moons hang in the sky. But the manuscript feels emotionally thin and technically fragile, as if someone has glimpsed another world but hasn’t quite learned how to make people believe it’s real.
Tengo keeps the surreal world intact but works with it and gives it what it lacks: psychological tension, prods to the subconscious, and small human truths. And as the novel unfolds, that rewritten world starts to brush against his own.
Why B2B specialists matter more than ever
I work with global B2B brands, so let me use a related example here.
B2B buying isn’t a solo sport. It’s decided by committees the size of small villages – 13 people on average (and it often feels like more). CFOs, CTOs, procurement, risk, sales, marketing. All with their own fears, hopes, veto power and calendar clashes.
Villages move at the speed of risk aversion. Progress only happens when enough people feel confident enough to say yes.
AI helps with the research, the summaries, the first, second, third cut of the deck. It’s good at that. Perhaps too good actually. But does it write or create content that can change minds and behaviours?
Some may believe it already does but the clients I work with would beg to differ. Specialists (of the human variety) are more important than ever. Only they can read the humans around the table, feel the heartbeat, look for subconscious clues and triggers. And then shape a story strong enough to carry a whole buying group.
AI can produce endless first versions, but they often resemble that original manuscript – intriguing ideas, little emotional weight. They feel like the outline of a world, not the lived reality of it.
In the short term, collaborating with AI lifts output quality and speed, no question. Over time, though, research shows it reduces our intrinsic motivation to do the creative work itself. We start settling for “good enough” because the machine’s already done the heavy lifting. Except it hasn’t. It’s done the easy lifting.
AI drafts need specialist craft
Nearly half of marketing teams now produce three to five times more content than last year, while budgets have risen by only 1-10%. Do the maths. Most work is edited and approved, but not always changed fundamentally. We’re simply polishing what machines produce rather than reimagining what it could be.
The danger isn’t that AI will replace specialists. It’s that we replace ourselves by treating AI outputs as finished work – settling for content that’s technically fine and emotionally empty. It’s becoming normal or convenient to skip the specialist step. To look at the AI output and decide it’s finished. Job done.
Except it isn’t – it’s a draft that won’t persuade anyone. (Unless your business model relies on boring, exhausting or confusing people with half-baked “assets”.)
Brands stay alive through the commitment – like Tengo – to keep evolving, recreating, refusing to settle for “fine”. To always aim for impact that’s unforgettable.
The specialist’s role in an AI-dominated world
Tengo’s rewrite created a different reality. And that’s a lesson for B2B brand leaders and specialists in our AI-dominated world.
AI will keep churning out drafts. But it’s the specialist mind and hand that make them believable, memorable, and powerful enough to change the course of things.
If you want your brand to mean something to people, channel your inner Tengo. Treat every AI output as a draft. Work with it, play with it, complete it.
Work with our B2B marketing experts to create an unforgettable impact.
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Written by Simon Heath, Director of Strategy and Planning at Definition on 10/12/2025
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