Words: Adam Ketterer – Founder
Category(s): Content
Date: 21st August 2026
I believe that writing – by the copywriters and content writers, but also by the founders, sales leaders, product marketers, messaging experts, and anyone else with a not-explicitly-writerly title whose job it is to put a B2B brand or product or service or point of view into words – might just be the most important discipline in your company.
It’s a belief I’ve held for years (especially whenever I was arguing for a pay rise), and it’s one that has steadily burned hotter in the past few years, as the value of human beings doing commercial writing has been subject to doubt, scrutiny and insult by the more AI-pilled companies out there.
(Disclaimer: I identify as a writer. I write copy and content and, if I’m honest, just about anything a B2B client asks me to write if I like them enough and the pay is good. I treat positioning and messaging as writing jobs at the end of the day. Not in a frustrated-arts-graduate kind of way, but because I know from experience that strategic decisions aren’t understood, made or followed unless they’re written down, and written well. You could say I’m biased.)
So if I sound defensive, it’s because I am. But I’m also protective – of the well-intentioned leaders and marketers I meet who are under pressure to use AI for writer-shaped jobs. I’ve seen it go quite well, and I’ve seen it go very badly.
What is lost when you outsource writing to machines?
What I keep coming back to, in my own grappling with this issue, is not (just) the objections we’re all familiar with: that in most people’s hands AI isn’t very good at writing, either on a surface level of style or a deeper level of substance.
The more important thing is what’s lost when you use AI to outsource the writing of your company’s central proposition and all expressions of it in your marketing. When you do that, you’re outsourcing the messy, difficult and necessary process that goes on beneath the surface of the writing process.
We write to know, not just to express
The written words are the output, but the process is the thing. The early instincts, the research and reading, the conversations, the dead ends and discarded darlings, the fights and the surprises.
I don’t claim to understand the writing process, even though I know it well. What I’m sure of is that it isn’t a process of predicting what word should come after the one before it, based on an average of the corpus.
The written outputs are nothing without the process, because they’re shaped by it. And the writers, in turn, are shaped by it too. If you short circuit that virtuous cycle of discovery and expression, the system fails. The work suffers, any semblance of a distinct POV is lost, nobody understands anything, and there can be no effective governance – let alone improvement – of that message down the line.
People who write form a decentralised ledger
When your job is to spark understanding and persuasion in your audience, it helps if the people doing the communicating actually decide what to say, understand what they’re saying, and are persuaded of it.
Inside any company (and inside the agencies that serve them), the people who write act like a decentralised ledger, creating, storing and safeguarding the lore of the organisation.
This is how and where I believe brands – and companies – are built. In the words they put out into the world and, just as importantly, in the minds of the people who write them.