Stop your thought leadership from being ignored

If you lean too far into B2B corporate speak, you risk losing your human voice and one of your strongest opportunities to cut through.

There’ll always be a place for tight tone-of-voice guidelines, particularly for big corporates. But since AI has been on the scene, ‘tight’ is becoming ‘generic’ and, most dangerously, ‘forgettable’ - a significant problem for thought leadership content.

AI is narrowing the range of language used. When so much of the content we read is shaped by the same models and linguistic patterns, and B2B decision-makers are bombarded by competing messages, there's even less for their memories to hold on to.

Your thought leadership may be genuinely fresh and valuable, but if it’s written the wrong way, it won’t cut through.

Why is our language becoming more alike?

In November 2024, the number of AI-generated articles being published online overtook those written by humans, according to an analysis of 65,000 online articles¹. By April 2025, a study found some AI-generated content in 74.2% of 900,000 newly published webpages analysed².

This means newer AI models are learning from an internet that older models helped write. Researchers have warned that repeatedly training models on AI-generated data can lead to 'model collapse’, where each generation drifts further from the diversity of the original human data³.

Measurable differences already exist in how newer models write. Research comparing human-written news with different generations of AI found that newer, larger models produce less diverse grammar and vocabulary than older ones. They also generate sentences 15–30% longer than human authors and use far fewer short sentences⁴.

The result is something most of us will recognise. Long, fluent, perfectly competent sentences that use familiar constructions and vocabulary. There’s nothing particularly wrong with them – but there’s nothing particularly memorable about them, either.

How do you preserve the human voice in thought leadership?

One of the simplest answers is to let more personality shine through in your B2B content, especially when it comes from a named subject matter expert.

Your experts have spent years developing their understanding and specialist knowledge, as well as explaining complex subjects to clients, colleagues and other stakeholders. In their time face-to-face with clients, they’ll have adapted their language to make difficult ideas easier to understand. They'll know which turns of phrase and explanations land, and which analogies and metaphors trigger an ‘ah yes’ moment.

Perhaps they paint a picture that compares quantum computing to ripples in a pond, or describe how a managed service streamlines operations the same way an aglet on a shoelace makes it easy to lace up a trainer.

These linguistic idiosyncrasies aren't something to polish out of their thought leadership content because they're part of what makes it valuable. Yet this is exactly what can happen during the writing and approvals process. An expert says something striking in an interview and, after several rounds of editing, it emerges as polished corporate prose.

The message survives, but its impact and memorability don’t.

Metaphors are magnets for memory

Keeping metaphors in your thought leadership content is especially valuable because they help us make sense of complicated, often abstract concepts.

They compress a complex thought into a single, high-impact image that’s usually grounded in something concrete, giving something unfamiliar a familiar frame of reference. Professor Stacy Pies of New York University describes its potential beautifully as “an imaginative leap that stretches how we think”⁵.

A strong metaphor can give an audience a new way of understanding the subject itself – particularly if there’s an element of novelty or the unexpected to the comparison. Unusual juxtapositions can jolt the brain and sharpen both attention and memory.

Keep the human alongside the corporate

Crafting effective B2B thought leadership content means reconciling individual linguistic touches with the corporate tone of voice. It isn’t about packing every article with elaborate analogies or manufacturing quirky language; in fact, this can quickly sound formulaic.

Like the subject matter experts who’ve spent years fine-tuning their explanations, we’ve spent two decades developing our specialism in thought leadership communication.

To talk about how we can help your organisation develop memorable thought leadership content, get in touch.

¹Graphite Growth (2025) ‘More articles are now created by AI than humans

²Hardwick, J. (2025) ‘74% of New Webpages Include AI Content (Study of 900k Pages)’

³Shumailov et al (2024) ‘AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data’

⁴Gude et al (2026) ‘More Aligned, Less Diverse? Analyzing the Grammar and Lexicon of Two Generations of LLMs’

⁵Schumacher, H. (2020) ‘The words that help us understand the world’

Frequently asked questions

How do you make B2B thought leadership more memorable?

Strong B2B thought leadership combines valuable expertise with a distinctive human voice. Rather than polishing away personality, retain the phrases, analogies, metaphors and explanations your subject matter experts naturally use. These can make complex ideas easier to understand and help your content stand out from more generic corporate writing.

How do you make AI-generated content sound more human?

Use AI as a tool, rather than having it generate your content's voice. Bring in original insights from subject matter experts, vary sentence length and structure and retain distinctive language that reflects how people actually speak and explain ideas. Avoid over-editing unusual or memorable turns of phrase simply to make them conform to a standard corporate style.

Why are metaphors effective in thought leadership content?

Metaphors help audiences understand complex or abstract ideas by connecting them with something more familiar and concrete. A strong, original metaphor can simplify an unfamiliar concept, attract attention and give readers a memorable way to understand it. This makes metaphor particularly useful in B2B thought leadership dealing with technical or complicated subjects.