AI-Supported Thought Leadership

Today’s high-level leaders are expected to not only run their organizations but be highly visible in their field. They need to regularly share insights through industry publications, keynote speeches, podcasts, blogs or interviews. They also need to provide insights within their organizations for panels, roundtables, and seminars. Whether you do it yourself or have an executive comms professional helping you out, AI makes it easier to stay informed and produce high-quality content. A few ways AI can help keep you ahead in your field.

AI Professional – Fiona Passantino, late November, 2024

Great Expectations

Leaders today are expected to publish to industry magazines regularly, give inspiring lectures at trade conferences, and conduct interviews with business podcasts or YouTube channels. If you are a professional tasked with executive communication on behalf of a C-Suite leader, or a freelancer doing all your own marketing content creation, AI can make the regular public display of your industry expertise easier, more efficient and more fun.

The goal is to be “the person” in the eyes of the world who knows everything about that middle patch of a Venn diagram showing the cross section of your role in your company (VAT compliance) and a particular patch of fast-forming news “out there” that impacts it (the recent elections in Sweden).

Before any writing can take place, you will need to devote several hours a week to research and reading to stay on top of quickly-changing news in your field of excellence. Using AI to crawl the web in search of current information in your specific niche will return a nice, packaged digest of what you need to know for the week.

For web crawling, either GPT-4 or Google Bard would be the tools of choice, simply because they are both hooked up and mainlining the current, live internet, able to show relevant articles from trusted sources that can be fact-checked. Once you have identified your go-to keywords, these tools can help find your sources fast.

These tools will also lead you to other thought leaders out there who are writing about the same topics. These people are rare creatures indeed, interested in that same Venn middle patch as you are, passionate about the same micro-manifestations of their topics. They are potential allies and collaborators. By reaching out and playing nice, they can alert you to breaking developments, hard-to-find case studies you never would have found otherwise.

Getting Started

Once you find the best articles, train your bot to look for specific authors, publications or blogs to go to first; this works by tapping into your memory profile. Then, you may notice that the articles you have collected are too long or complex to read in the time you have; that’s when you dump the copy into the entry portal and ask for a summary of the main points. Follow up every reference to outside sources by hand, even if you’re using the latest version of an LLM that insists is hallucination-free.

From these points, you add your own thoughts; then you generate content for yourself, weaving in all the points you have gathered into a piece that summarizes the news of note plus your layer of insight. This is perfect for writing articles, whitepapers and blog posts. Use AI further to generate good introduction ideas, catchy titles and sub-topics.

A good thought leader will rewrite every word by hand, no matter how good the AI version might be. Even if it’s been trained with your own voice, it will never be able to speak “you” better than you, use your expressions, tone, level of formality or your sense of humor, drama or affect like you do. And, it will learn; as you progress, you will teach each other, more and more, how to write in your voice, using your particular turns of phrase, expressions and structure.

If you need fresh statistics for your piece and have access to an internal IT department, you can ask for proprietary algorithms that process and analyze raw, external datasets to uncover trends and patterns. This is used to support the threads of your content with evidence-based arguments, and, if you have Bard or GPT-4 with Dall-E, export to pretty pie charts you came up with (almost) all by yourself.

If you (or the CEO for whom you are ghostwriting) have a large number of followers, AI is perfect for generalized sentiment analysis or post-crawling to uncover which of your previous posts are high-performers and which are best left to die quietly in a dark corner of the web. AI can also help break down your audience with demographic data and behavior, which can give you further ideas for what to re-post from others, tag, comment on and promote.

The predictive powers of LLM can turn your posts into your forecasts for the future. Anticipate challenges, identify opportunities, and provide perspectives for the next quarter by simply feeding in the relevant current data and asking the bot to come up with a few possible outcomes based on what it reads.

Modality Changing

Finally, use AI for format changing: one single idea you might have had in the shower can take many forms (what AI world calls “modalities”) to reach a variety of audiences. A blog post can be condensed into a PowerPoint slide, illustrated with a GAN output. An article can be expanded into a white paper or teased out into a series of social posts.

Thought leadership does not have to be in the form of text alone. A great 2-minute weekly leadership podcast or social reel can have far more impact and reach, provided the leader in question is a natural communicator, comfortable with cameras in her face at odd times of day.

Whether for internal communications or external, “stand-alone” industry podcasts or a guest appearance, AI-generated talking points or full scripts can be a good way to prepare and deliver, and a very Human medium to reach and speak to other Humans.

Need help with AI Integration?

Reach out to me for advice – I have a few nice tricks up my sleeve to help guide you on your way, as well as a few “insiders’ links” I can share to get you that free trial version you need to get started.