For those who toil in the thought leadership industrial complex, 2025 turned out to be a year of mixed messages, emotions, and conclusions. We started out with months of hand-wringing about the corrosive threat of AI slop drowning out original, value-adding insights on digital feeds. But then, just in time for Christmas, the Wall Street Journal delivered a perfect joy to our world piece about big companies “desperately seeking” — and handsomely paying — skilled storytellers. LinkedIn erupted with huzzahs from comms pros: the content cavalry was coming.
This may seem out of character, but our reaction was, “Not so fast!” Obviously we would be the last outfit to ever pooh-pooh outstanding storytelling and storytellers getting their due in elite business circles. But like some of our fellow, battle-scarred skeptics, we can’t help but see two sides of the same disconcerting coin here: the fast fad of the easy fix too many aspiring thought leaders are falling for.
The hard truth about the thought leadership trade is that it’s hard work. Enlightening audiences and earning credibility demands skin in the game and time at the grindstone — or should we say, mindstone. Whether you are outsourcing your content creation to cheap bots or expensive humans, neither can be a replacement for original thinking and continuous commitment on the part of aspiring thought leaders.
Yet, too often, we see C-suiters opting for effort-saving shortcuts. Exhibit A in this trend is the growing tyranny of the fireside chat at major conferences and various forums. The move away from the big podium speech as the standard speaking format in recent years is understandable given the widespread presumptions about shortening attention spans among today’s audiences and the perceived advantages of unscripted conversations for authenticating authenticity. But as Professional Speechwriters Association Executive Director David Murray has argued, “Chumminess isn’t a strategy.”
This is to say, while informal dialogues have their place as communication tools, they can’t come close to matching a deliberately conceived and smartly crafted speech as a conduit for complex ideas and/or compelling arguments. More than the prose that comes out, the real value derives from the process that goes into it — as most speech pros can attest, the work of developing a prepared text is a forcing mechanism for disciplined thinking.
The key word here, of course, is “work.” We were reminded of this by a bracing piece in the Spectator by our friend Brian Jenner, founder of the European Speechwriting Network, about how AI is killing the art of speechwriting.
“In recent years, it has been common for high-status people to ask speechwriters to find some words to go with their slide deck. They have a baffling faith in the ability of slides to convey ideas. The miracle of AI is that it can really do this — in seconds. It’s not surprising that big companies love it,” Jenner noted.
“They imagine AI will increase productivity, but as Rory Sutherland will tell you, the potency and meaningfulness of any communication depends on ‘the costliness of its creation.’ AI, like PowerPoint before it, will solve the problem of the speaker who needs to find ‘content,’ but the tool does nothing for audiences who crave leadership and something worth listening to.”
Think of it this way: would you hire an elite personal trainer and then not show up to the gym? If your new year’s resolution is to up your thought leadership game, we’re all for partnering with an elite storytelling trainer — and our agency would be happy to help find a custom solution for you. But our best advice is to get ready to get intellectually sweaty if you want that involvement to pay off.
