Yes, You Absolutely Should Use AI for Business Writing
AI has become a divisive topic in professional communications. Many journalists, in particular, have been vocal opponents and not without some self-interest in the matter.
Meanwhile, a contingent of businesspeople has begun to wonder whether any AI-assisted writing is, by definition, "slop": low-effort, generic, and unworthy of serious attention. I understand the skepticism.
There is a lot of genuinely bad AI writing out there. But the existence of bad AI writing no more indicts the tool than bad human writing indicts the keyboard.
AI writing can be bad, but does AI, when used well, make for better business writing? The answer is yes, and our position as marketers and communicators should reflect that.
All business writing is schematic, and that's fine
Here is a foundational truth about business writing that its defenders rarely admit: It is, at its core, schematic. A bylined thought leadership article follows a recognizable structure. So does a press release, a pitch email, a white paper, or a blog post. Each has its conventions and expected arc. Readers of business content have internalized those structures, and the conventions exist because they work.
The schematic nature of business writing is precisely what makes it efficient.
This is also why AI is such an effective tool for producing it. LLMs are, in essence, pattern-recognition engines trained on enormous volumes of text. When the patterns in question are the well-worn grooves of business communication, AI navigates them fluently. With expert prompting and rigorous human editing on the back end, AI can produce drafts that are not only serviceable but genuinely strong.
What's more, it often incorporates specifics that even experienced human writers struggle to marshal entirely on their own: the precise language a client uses, the technical nuances of their product, and the details that make a piece feel authoritative rather than generic.
Rejecting AI for business writing is a form of technological resistance that mistakes novelty for danger.
Honesty about AI is good business
There is a temptation, even among those who use AI regularly, to treat it as something slightly shameful. This instinct should be resisted. Hiding AI use implies it is a form of cheating, and it isn't. For communications professionals serving tech companies, many of whom are actively building and innovating on AI themselves, covertly distancing yourself from the very technology your clients champion is at best awkward and at worst incoherent.
The honest position is also the defensible one: AI is an extremely valuable tool for writing better and faster. The firms and practitioners who embrace that position, explain it clearly, and back it up with quality work will be more credible than those caught in the uncomfortable middle — using AI while pretending otherwise.
Clients deserve to know how their content is being produced. And in our case, that explanation comes with a genuine rationale: good AI-assisted writing, meaning writing produced with thoughtful prompting and meaningful human editing, is a legitimate methodology.
The slop problem is real, but its cause is misdiagnosed. Poor AI writing is the result of poor prompting and the absence of editorial judgment rather than the AI itself. A weak brief fed into any model will produce a weak draft. Minimal human involvement on the back end will leave that draft weak. The solution is not to abandon the tool; it is to use it with the same rigor and craft you would apply to any other part of the creative process.
You should know the rules of the room
None of this means that every outlet, editor, and client shares this view. Some publications have developed policies against AI-assisted content, and those policies are their prerogative. Editors have always had the right to set submission standards — to accept some pieces and reject others based on criteria that may or may not align with our own priorities. When a publication's stance is clear, the practical response is equally clear: For those outlets, the work gets done by hand. That is a constraint worth accommodating rather than a philosophical defeat.
That said, it should not become a blanket rationale for abandoning AI across the board. Adjusting your approach for specific outlets is a workflow decision that does not require revising your underlying position on the tool's value. The more important strategic takeaway, actually, is that relying heavily on any single publication or gatekeeper for earned media, or building your entire communications strategy around winning placement in one or two trade outlets, is a fragile approach regardless of how those outlets feel about AI.
Gatekeepers have always had the power to say no. The stronger play is the one that reduces your dependence on their yes.
That is, ultimately, what a good modern communications strategy looks like: Leveraging every available tool, including AI, to produce high-quality content across owned and distributed channels, while understanding which constraints apply where. The goal is to wield the tool well and to be honest with clients and audiences about the fact that you do.
Yes, of course. I used AI to write this essay
Yes, I used AI to write this essay.
Here’s what I did: I wrote three long paragraphs with my viewpoint on this issue by hand. In fact, I wrote them as an email to my team about our own policy on AI writing. Then, I went to Claude. I gave it the following prompt (lightly edited here):
[start of prompt]: can you turn this email to my team into a newsletter? below "exec evangelism a theory of modern comms" [I included a link to a past newsletter I wrote by hand] is a style/structure guide. the piece should be structured and stylized like that: medium paragraphs, flowing sentences. not too choppy. more like an essay. this is not about one publication; it is about broader skepticism toward AI and how to tell the difference between good and bad AI writing. it's also about being honest about our use of it as marketers.
headline: Yes, You Absolutely Should Use AI for Business Writing
intro: AI is divisive as a business writing tool. Journalists in particular often oppose it. Some businesspeople wonder if all AI-assisted writing is "slop." etc.
And then I copied and pasted my three hand-written paragraphs about the use of AI for business writing. [end of prompt]
Claude produced a thoughtful and logical draft true to the substance of my thinking and similar to my hand-written style. Of course, Claude’s draft had some bot-isms (clichés of AI style), so I edited most of them out. And the result is the piece you see here.
There is nothing to fear about AI writing in terms of the quality of the writing itself. So, we should be asking ourselves: Who’s afraid of AI? And why?
