Hello Reader
Years ago, when I was VP of Marketing at a SaaS platform, I had a content problem I couldn't solve with budget. We were too small to justify a full-time writer and I was already doing the work of three people, so doing it myself wasn't realistic.
The answer was freelancers.
I'd find a writer, brief them on our product and audience (corporate travel managers, a niche with its own language and priorities) and wait two weeks for something I could publish.
What came back was almost always the same.
Keyword-stuffed, surface-level, structured like an SEO checklist rather than something a human would want to read. I'd spend a weekend rewriting it, questioning whether I should've written it myself.
Finding people who can write well, understand your market and produce at the volume you need is genuinely hard.
When AI arrived and could do all three, I stopped rewriting freelancer drafts on weekends—mostly because I stopped hiring freelancers.
And while many professionals argue that AI is a terrible writer, WritingBench shows most models now score above 80 (out of 100) on thousands of copy related tasks.
That's way ahead of many professional copywriters and content creators.
Which might lead you to ask: “If AI can write better than my team, what exactly do I need writers for?”
Three reasons you hired writers. AI just took all of them.
For most of the last decade, marketing leaders hired writers, contractors or full creative agencies for one of three reasons:
- Their team didn't have the skill
- They couldn't produce at the volume they needed
- They didn't have the bandwidth
AI has changed all three of those calculations.
A director who couldn't produce a decent first draft can now generate one in four minutes. A lean team bottlenecked on copy now has a drafting layer that runs continuously.
Research, planning, brainstorming, outlines, repurposing across channels—AI can handle all of it as a first pass, with a human refining the output.
We’re seeing the results of this now in how teams are being structured.
Where a VP of marketing might have hired two or three writers, or retained a content agency, many are now hiring one strong writer responsible for the entire copy function, with AI doing the volume work and that person providing oversight, judgment and quality control.
What a lean content team looks like in 2026
Erin Mills, CMO of Quorum, has built an AI agent system that interviews her CEO and converts those conversations into SEO and AEO-optimized content. Her content creators and writers are still on the team, but their job is to orchestrate the system, not do the drafting.
As Erin explains: “Our Senior Manager of Content sits under our VP of PMM and oversees both our web developer and content manager. The content manager owns programs like webinars and social, but the work is less about starting every piece from a blank page and more about shaping the right inputs, coordinating with SMEs, pressure-testing the message, and ensuring what goes out is accurate, useful, and on-brand.”
For approvals, Erin’s team uses a dedicated Slack channel with reviewers mapped by content type. Depending on the asset, the right people are tagged there for review, usually PMM, the marketing leadership team, or whoever owns the subject matter.
“We still have content ownership, but AI has moved the team higher up the value chain,” she says. “The human work is now much more about judgment, editing, strategy, SME alignment, and quality control than manual drafting.”
That model is showing up across marketing teams in different forms.
Creators describe shifting from production to curation where AI handles everything from outlines and drafts, to repurposing and captions. With AI handling so much of the execution, the creator can focus on strategy, storytelling and final polish.
Erin's team has compressed content creation from weeks to a single day using this exact system.
Without oversight, though, that speed produces what the marketing community has started calling "slop" — bland, generic, robotic output that erodes audience trust. In teams where the human layer is thin, quality is dipping even as volume goes up.
The Problem with AI Slop
Jared Blank has spent years fixing brand copy. As founder of Sagelett Digital and author of Gobbledy, a newsletter about the language of marketing (and one of my favorites!), he has a front-row seat to what happens when companies lose their voice to generic copy.
As he told me, AI is making the problem significantly worse.
"I read a lot of software homepages,” he says. “I also read a lot of AI-generated content about software homepages. The difference is getting harder to explain to my clients, which is either a problem or a business opportunity depending on who you ask."
The one thing AI can't build for you
Mike Kaput, Chief Content Officer at Marketing AI Institute, presented a framework at the recent AI for Writers Summit on what writing capabilities retain value when AI handles the drafting.
He identified five:
#1: Verification
AI output is confident and polished, and frequently wrong. Models hallucinate sources, invent statistics and smooth over quotes in ways that shift their meaning.
Most marketing teams don't have a formal process for catching this. They assume the writer reviewed it, the writer assumes the editor checked it, and it goes out with a fabricated number in paragraph three.
Someone on your team needs to own verification as an explicit function, with a repeatable process behind it.
#2: Original inputs
AI works from what's publicly available. Customer interviews, sales call recordings, years of firsthand market observation—none of that is in the training data.
Content built from original inputs is what stands apart from everything the competition is generating. The teams whose content stands out over the next two years will have better inputs, (not better prompts).
#3: Brand
AI doesn't have a name, face or reputation. Building the kind of trust that makes a reader open every email or engage with a post because of the byline takes a human who understands the audience and shows up consistently.
“Most tech companies pre-AI would have admitted that their writing lacked clarity and the brand a differentiated voice,” Jared says. “So layering AI on top of that will produce unclear, undifferentiated slop…but now it can do it at volume.”
In a content environment where volume is essentially free, trust is one of the scarcest assets you have.
#4: Judgment
AI can produce a hundred headline variants in five minutes. Knowing which one is good, what'll land with your specific audience, what to kill before it goes out. Teams without a strong editorial voice are producing volume without quality, and their audiences are noticing.
#5: Creativity and invention
AI recombines what already exists. Originating something genuinely new, such as a framework nobody has articulated, a point of view that goes against the consensus, or a piece of research your audience hasn't seen yet is still a human capability.
“The lack of original thinking comes from a fear that originality will in some way turn off a prospect,” Jared says. “So every company just says ‘our brand voice is authoritative but approachable,’ which just means, “we don’t want to stand out at all.”
Original thinking is your most defensible content asset, and the one most teams under-invest in because production pressure always wins.
She thought AI would ruin everything
In the early 2020s I hired a head of content who was sharp, understood our brand and knew how to make a genuine connection with an audience.
When ChatGPT launched she was violently opposed. The idea of AI writing offended her at a professional level.
The people who are most unsettled by AI writing are often the ones who understand content most deeply. You need to acknowledge that discomfort (rather than dismissing it), but the leaders I've seen handle this transition well don't wait for their teams to arrive at comfort on their own. They invest in structured development, give people quality tools and find ways to create early wins.
It's worth noting that the head of content eventually became one of the more thoughtful AI practitioners I've encountered and went on to launch her own AI company, helping content creators turn everything they've ever made into an intelligent, searchable knowledge system.
So what's your plan for future content creation?
Will you have a clear answer for how your AI and human team will operate? If not, the audit below will help.