Plato called them prisoners in a cave. Locked in a grotto for life, they face the back wall, only seeing shadows created by people and objects behind them. They construct their worldview by looking at silhouettes dancing on the wall.

Many businesses feel like captives trying to make the right technology choices. Investments tend to be huge, and the implications are tantamount. Successful digital transformation drives business – but a major procurement miss may lead to business closure.

Buyers of B2B tech are always looking for someone to free them from shackles, walk them out to daylight, and show them a world of opportunities.

In PR, we call these liberators thought leaders. Today, their role in driving business may be greater than ever. Why? Because of rapidly developing large language models, or more familiarly, generative AI.

Let me take you down...

On November 30, 2022, the landscape of the communications industry shifted with the launch of ChatGPT, a breakthrough in generative AI that allowed every human and their canine to produce content that, supposedly, was fit for all kinds of purposes, not least for selling goods and services.

In the spring of 2024, our agency, Netprofile, produced a trend report looking at the marcomms horizon of the next three years. We called it Insight Track 2024: B2B Tech PR and Marketing in the Age of AI. As the name implies, language models do feature.

For data, we interviewed 21 B2B tech communications and marketing executives operating in Northern Europe. The report provides a ringside view into how AI is shaping the industry.

Insight Track confirms what most of us know: Gen AI has put content creation on steroids. ChatGPT is happy to dig its hands in the soil and do groundwork – things we previously might have asked a more junior colleague to help us with. The fact that GPT comes up with stuff in seconds is very handy.

Our respondents, however, point out that AI-created content is average. It's derivative, formulaic, and, in many cases, inconsequential. It fails to create new ideas and worlds that audiences want to immerse themselves in, as Erik van de Nadort has previously discussed in these pages. The creative human touch is missing.

In the highly critical, well-educated segment of B2B tech procurement, irrelevant content is a death trap. Regarding communications investment, it's like setting banknotes on fire and releasing them to the winds.

I think I know, but it's all wrong

In the current low conjuncture, tech buyers seek strategic partnerships rather than transactional flings with the latest vibey boutiques. At the same time, digitalisation rages on. In the innovation avalanche, leaders need help deciding which partner would benefit them the most.

They don't much care for mindless marketing noise layered with conventional wisdom and quasi-robotic AI word salad. They need someone to provide them with relevant knowledge that helps them in their job.

In our report, the marcomms executives suggest that authentic thought leadership is the answer. It's about content that appreciates the business reality of the buyer, offering solutions to their real-world needs. As the needs can be very specific, the target segments can be small, and messaging needs to be highly personalised.

Importantly, authentic thought leadership accounts for the human relationship between the seller and the buyer. High-quality content speaks emotively, engaging the buyer in business-sustaining human interaction.

"Authenticity is everything regardless of the story you want to tell", the report quotes Rickard Waldenström, Head of Corporate Communications & PR, Nordics at Salesforce. "Audiences are clever. If you're not authentic, the narrative isn't persuasive."

Compelling content and human connection are, naturally, firmly outside the reach of current AI models.

Hard to be someone, but it all works out

So, it all boils down to human creativity. Coming up with things that only human grey matter can think of.

The concept of personal branding takes centre stage. People buy from people. Leaders and experts face a huge opportunity to become brand ambassadors for their organisations. Most of the time, what they say or write will be seen as much more trustworthy than any wisdom the corporation offers.

For example, think of Tim Cook versus Apple. Whose social media post would you find more intriguing and trustworthy? Most will likely choose the former. It's not a fault of the enterprise but a virtue of a living human being.

"The role of personal branding is growing at an insane pace", says Rami Saarela, CMO at Deloitte Finland, in the report. "Trust is human-centred, and a corporate brand can't do all the work for an individual. It's like a high jump competition. Choose not to jump, and someone else will jump in your place."

Nothing to get hung about

In Insight Track, the highest estimate of AI's efficiency improvement in marcomms is as much as 30–40%, which is a big thing. To harness AI's potential smoothly, we can look into the guidelines Tom Davenport and John J. Sviokla laid out in Harvard Business Review.

Gartner tells us that AI has passed its peak of inflated expectations. Right now, in line with Amara's Law, we have possibly overestimated AI's impact in the short term but may be underestimating it in the long term. Things are cooking under the hood.

We bumped into a new layer of gen AI's capabilities a week before writing this. NotebookLM is a Google project that features the ability to turn anything in writing into a podcast hosted by two AI voices.

We fed it the Insight Track report, and in a couple of minutes, it produced an 11-minute podcast hosted by two AI presenters. Have a listen if you don't know the technology yet. It's nothing short of mind-blowing – and if this is what they have put out now, what's in the pipeline?

Amidst the advances, there's good reason to hang tight and invest in human creative capability that makes a difference. AI looks back; creativity and innovation explore the horizon. We humans rule the roost and will do so in the foreseeable future.

In case you didn't catch it yet, the offbeat headers of this piece allude to the lyrics of "Strawberry Fields" by John Lennon and the Beatles.

That's visionary art that is far beyond anything AI is capable of.