AI is making every business think the same

Thank you for inviting Mikolas. Great to be here.

So my background was in journalism originally. and I've always been interested in writing and editorial and that was my I guess first love really. but as I progressed through my career I started to move a little bit closer to the commercial side of things and you know get closer to businesses and and understand more about what businesses are trying to achieve through, you know, their communications and through their messaging. And I loved that. So I loved the idea that, you know, you could help a company to change its direction, change its positioning, you know, shift perceptions, enhance its reputation and do all these really, really powerful things through the use of really great insight and and really great language. So that was that was interesting because it felt like a very powerful tool. And I was always interested in the idea that you could influence people's thinking in that way. And thought leadership felt like a really good place to be in that in that sense because basically that's what it's all about. We're trying to, you know, change our audiences thinking in some way or change their perception of a business in some way. and I really like that craft. I think it's a really fascinating thing to be involved with. and I do see it as a craft. I think it is something that is quite specific. it's different from journalism in many ways. It's a different way of approaching a topic, a different way of approaching a problem. and you know, they're quite complex problems sometimes. it's you know, you're you're not just writing an article, you're actually trying to create an argument and you know, get people to think differently in some ways. So I think there's that sort of influencing piece, I think, is is is I think something that drew me to this this industry, and the ability to get close and understand business.

I think the first mistake a lot of them make is is not to spend enough time understanding their audience. Very often companies are trying to say something or they have you know, they want to broadcast in a way their positioning and say, This is who we are, this is what we stand for, please listen to us. Where actually it makes a lot more sense to start with the audience and you know, figure out excuse me, figure out what your audience is worried about, what they're thinking about, and craft your message around that. So I've always advocated that sort of audience first approach as being the best way to do that. and to see it as a way of listening really rather than broadcasting. I think that's the key difference.

Hm. Yeah. Yeah. Excuse me, Nicholas, I've something like friend. yeah, so I think that the the second biggest mistake, aside from not listening to the audience, is trying to say too much. So you know, many companies are large and complex and they have lots of things they could say to their audience. But the audience is not really equipped to absorb all of those messages. And sometimes I think there is they have so much to say that they want to say it all and communicate too many things, and basically as an audience, we're not we're not really we don't really want that. We don't really want to have multiple messages coming from an organization. We want clarity, you know, we want simplicity. We want to understand who they are and what they stand for in a matter of seconds, in the same way as an advertiser does. You know, when you're creating an ad advertisement, you're communicating a simple message. You're not trying to communicate nine or ten messages because people will not remember that. They will not absorb it. So I think, particularly in the B2B space, which can be complex, and a lot of organizations have many different business units and different products and services that you know are all fascinating in their own right. But you know, very often there's just too much going on. and so I think trying to distill that down into a simple overall overall message is something that a lot of companies struggle with.

in general or in the context of thought leadership or just just in general.

yeah, in in general, you know, I think it's obviously a transformative technology. my sense of speaking to companies about it though is that I think we're still in the early days. I still I still think we're in the days when there's a lot of experimentation going on and a lot of change that I don't think we've yet seen you know, be be completed. And so from a a business standpoint and how we design roles and the kind of work that we will do in the future, remains up for grabs. I think there's also a sense though that there's a positive and a negative. I think the positive is that you know when it's used well and when it's it's integrated into the way we do business, it can be incredibly powerful. We can get things done more quickly, we can be more efficient, we can make better decisions, we can create better insights, we can analyze a huge amount of data very, very rapidly, and and all of that helps us make better decisions. Or it should make help us to make better decisions in business. But I think there's a downside too that I think you know there is in a sense I worry about the outsourcing of thinking and I worry about the way in which we are perhaps becoming a little bit lazy in how we think and how we analyze. And in some ways I think, you know, that does always require hard work and it does always requ require a little bit of chance and serendipity. We have to think about things in a in a different way. Whereas I think what AI can possibly do is channel us down a specific route and a specific way of thinking and may actually encourage a bit more groupthink. and a bit more similarity in how businesses think and approach problems. So that's my sense is that actually the you know what we have to do in business is try to introduce more diversity of thinking, you know, look at problems in a novel way and ensure that we're using our brains and that we're not outsourcing our thinking to AI and letting it make decisions on our behalf. Because I think ultimately that way you end up with a very sort of average approach, I think, rather than something that's novel and fresh and innovative. I'm still a strong believer that, you know, that requires human insight. and we need to use that and we need to exercise that in the same way we exercise our bodies, we have to exercise our brains. And I worry a little bit that, you know, that's becoming less the case as people, you know, use these tools, find them incredibly useful, saves them a lot of time, but also means they think a little bit less about the problems that they're they're facing.

Yeah. There's but if you think about, you know, the quality of ideas and thinking as a bell curve, you know, if you're if you're at the sort of lower end and you you don't know much about a topic or you need a lot of help, then AI is a great tool to get you to the middle of that bell curve and get you to a sort of you know, the medium if you like. but if you're at the other end, there's a danger that you're just gonna kind of go the opposite direction and revert to the mean. So I think that's the that's the challenge and that's where, as you say, we'll get a clustering of averageness. I think is the is the concern.

Well, I think, you know, it's a lot of listening. you know, what we want to do first is understand the nature of your business. you know, we want to understand, you know, your ambitions as a business, what you're trying to achieve. we want to understand who your customers are so that we can get a sense of the audience that you're trying to reach. We want to understand your competitive environment, so who are you up against and how is the dynamics of that competitive environment changing over time? And ultimately You know, what are you famous for currently? You know, what are you known for as a business and what's unique about your organisation? Because good thought leadership is about expressing that uniqueness. You want your audience to come away with a strong sense of who the producer of that thought leadership is, what they stand for, what they should be known for, why you should talk to them. and that's all about trying to understand the the unique vantage point that most organisations have, because most do, you know, although They may on the surface look very similar. Once you get to know them, you find that there are some differentiating factors and there are some areas that are really interesting that you can bring out. So that's the sort of the idea, I think, is trying to get to that, get to that distinctiveness and that uniqueness of a business so that you can help them express that and ensure that their audience comes away with a you know a good sense of who they are and what they stand for.

If they were if they were trying to get into the same space as as I've been working in in in my career, well first of all I think there has been a lot of change because of AI and because of the maturity of you know this area. When I started, thought leadership was still not new, but it wasn't widely used, I would say. And nowadays it is. I think it's become very, very commonplace in the in the B to B space. I think what I would say though to someone who wanted to get into this space is to you know to think differently about it. I think there is a a formula that's being has been used for many years when it comes to how communic how companies communicate their messaging to audiences and their presentation of their content, the presentation of their thinking and thought leadership, which has become quite formulaic. And so I think for a younger generation of entrepreneurs who are looking to get into this space, I think it's trying to break that model and trying to look at it in a different way. And that could be looking at how research is done differently. That could be looking at how content is presented differently. And essentially trying to look at fresher, more innovative ways of doing things. Because that's what you need in order to get noticed now, I think. So I think that there is need for innovation. There's a constant need for innovation in how companies communicate with the market to ensure that they don't just look look like everybody else or look like they're you know saying something similar to everyone else. I think the other thing that's really important is is to be curious, is to have that curiosity about, you know, where business is going, so that it doesn't require, you know, really in depth specialist knowledge, I don't think. It's more about joining the dots between different trends and looking for what's round the next corner. And I think that curiosity about where we're headed, where companies are going, where business is going, where sectors are changing, how they're changing, being curious about that is is really key. And so if you can look at ways to build connections that are perhaps a little bit unexpected, or look for patterns and trends that are a bit unexpected as well, then That's always served me well and I think that will continue to serve the next generation that's moving into the space well as well.

Well, a little bit like like I just said, I think you know, I'm I'm more I'm I guess I'm trying to be the twenty old twenty year old me, and I'm trying to you know, revitalise and and rethink how we go about communicating to business audiences and you know trying to revitalise and refresh that and look at ways of doing it differently. So I'm very, very interested in novel approaches to research. you know, thought leadership and this kind of work depends on insight and it depends on research. But what that's always meant usually is doing surveys. And surveys are fine. I I think surveys are still useful, but they've also become a bit of a lazy approach to correct to gathering insight. And one of the things AI enables you to do is gather insight in very different ways. And to do it much more quickly and to do it in deeper ways than using traditional surveys. So that's an area that I'm focused on is you know how do we get the underlying research that companies can then use as the foundation for their communications and messaging and do that in a way that's fresher and that ultimately generates new insight in in novel ways. So that's an area that I'm particularly interested in. I'm also very interested in how we you know present our thinking. And again, this is an area that in in thought leadership has been very traditional. You know, the PDF report has been the mainstay of a lot of this kind of work and it still is, even though that's a format that's you know 30, 40 years old and it's not really fit for purpose. They have it it has its uses and there are some advantages of the PDF, but there are many disadvantages as well. And I think that you know digital marketing has been underutilised in this space, in the B to B space. I don't think we've done enough to think about how to present what we do in a way that is you know what audiences expect now from really good content because we're not just competing against other B to B organizations. We're competing against, you know, the the the c main consumer channels. You know, we the there there are people expect the same kind of standards. and and and as B to B marketers we shouldn't be held to a different standard, and you know, think that we can get away with doing things that are not as innovative as as you'd find in in in consumer entertainment or consumer marketing.

The best place to what to find you know more about what what I do is on LinkedIn. So Rob Mitchell, Exhibit B Partners. I'm a reasonably prolific producer of content there and I'm very interested in you know how we communicate in the B to V space and and how we do it differently and how we do it better. So that's my kind of you know key area. And so if people are interested in finding more about that, that's a good place to start. and our website, which is exhibit hyphenb.co dot uk. We also has a lot of content there. We have webinars, we have ebooks, we have blog content. So there's lot of things that you know people can find there if they're interested in learning more about what we do. and and also get in touch. You know, I'm always happy to talk to anybody in this space and and have a conversation around the industry and and what's What's changing and, you know, how we can make it better.

Thank you very much. It's pleasure to be here.