How strategic AI support elevates research, planning, and quality, without replacing original thinking
Recently in my consulting practice, I was tasked with creating an Industry Report and Thought Leadership paper for a Software-as-a-Service client. The project was exciting as it entailed interviewing current software clients and industry thought leaders about their own challenges, successes and experiences in the industry. The goal for the report was to share valuable insights, not to be a sales piece disguised as an industry paper.
Why spend time and resources on an industry report that is not directly related to your product? The net/net is that customers buy products/services from people or companies who they feel will help them achieve their goals. They look for partnerships that support collaboration and the ability to overcome challenges together to ensure both parties achieve their strategic objectives.
Oftentimes, this type of project gets put on the back burner because it is time consuming to create longer-form content. Because of the time commitment, it is tempting to use AI for content creation. Although it seems like AI can produce content (and it definitely can), it tends to be formulaic, detectable and typically does not hold the reader’s attention.
This is not the reaction we are looking for. We want to create engaging content that holds the reader’s attention and encourages them to see our company as their partner in success.
Rather than using AI to create the material, it is better to use AI as a planning and research tool. Here is a high level summary of how I use AI to create longer form content:
- Create a very detailed prompt to prime your AI tool. For example, explain the company background, product/services, target market, ideal customer profile, the market challenges, specific wins and success, customer examples, goals/expected outcomes for the content and key topics to be covered. The more details, the better.
- With this detailed prompt, ask your AI assistant to create an outline for your paper/report.
- Review the outline and adjust/customize for your project.
- If interviewing thought leaders and subject matter experts, ask your AI tool to use the outline to create a list of relevant and focused interview questions.
- For interviewing thought leaders, I recommend using a tool like Zoom to record the conversations and with their AI Companion, convert the video recordings to text and create conversation summaries. The summaries will help to zero in on the highlights of the interview.
- While writing the paper, there are additional ways that you can use AI as an assistant:
- Search for relevant supporting statistics and quotes
- Verify information from your interviews
- Check spelling, grammar and punctuation
- Help with re-phrasing an idea that is awkwardly worded
- Remove redundant or repetitive information
- Create call to action copy to be used throughout the paper
- Test out different section titles and the overall title for the paper.
After going through the above process, I end up with a stellar rough draft to work from and can then focus on filling in the gaps and tidying up the paper. Although you still have to work at creating great content, AI can help with several tasks, which ultimately saves time.
Last but not least, a word of caution. If you are a content creator and passing off AI written content as your own, you can easily be found out! There are many free AI detector tools available today. For example, I ran this post through the free AI detector by Grammarly as an example of how easy it is to check.
Reiterating this message: AI lacks spontaneous, original creativity that is inherent to human creators. AI can imitate styles and patterns but struggles to produce truly novel ideas or think outside the data it has been trained on.
If you feel like you are late to the game with using AI for creating valuable business content, you are definitely not. We are still in the early days and there is plenty of time to test out and learn different tools. If you are struggling to get beyond using simple ChatGPT prompts and would like to learn more, I recommend taking a specific, online AI course related to your industry/skillset that comes with a certificate. This way you can add it to your list of credentials (moving forward this will be required for most industries). For example, the first AI course that I took through an online learning platform was “The complete AI guide: 50+ Generative AI Tools to 10x Business, Productivity, Creativity | ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence, Prompt Engineering” and it was free through my public library membership.
P.S. I used AI to generate the graphic image for this article. It is not close to the quality that would come from a human graphic designer but it works for the purpose of this article.