Your AI writes the content. But does anyone care?

Let me be upfront: I use AI tools regularly in my work. They help me research faster, brainstorm angles, and draft content more efficiently. If you're not using them yet, you probably should be.

But after more than two decades in PR and communications, experience has taught me one thing. AI is brilliant at producing content. It's not so brilliant at knowing what to do with it.

There's a difference between generating words and managing a reputation. For most business owners, that gap only becomes visible when something goes wrong.

Content has one job

Before we talk about AI, algorithms, or publishing frequency, it's worth stepping back to ask a more basic question: why do we produce content at all?

The answer is simple, and it gets forgotten surprisingly often. Content exists to connect with another person. Not to fill a posting schedule, not to signal that your company is active online, and not to demonstrate that you have opinions about your industry. At the end of the chain, there is a reader, a potential customer, a decision-maker, someone who could one day choose your business over a competitor's. Everything you publish either moves that person closer to you or it doesn't.

That's the standard content should be measured against. Not word count, not posting frequency, not whether it sounds authoritative. Does it resonate with the person you're trying to reach?

That question gets lost more often than you'd think. Right now, with AI making it easier than ever to produce content at volume, publishing has become an exercise in activity rather than impact.

The part that still needs a person

AI can write a press release. It cannot pick up the phone to a journalist it has a ten-year relationship with and say, "I've got something you'll want to look at." It cannot read the room when a story starts gaining traction in the wrong direction. It cannot make a judgment call at 9pm on a Friday when a client's name is about to appear in a news article for all the wrong reasons.

Reputation is built on trust, and trust is built between people.

In the South African market, that's even more true. This is a relationship-driven environment. Knowing who to call, how to frame a story for a local audience, and which battles are worth fighting all come from years of experience, not a prompt.

When everything starts to sound the same

Spend ten minutes on LinkedIn and a pattern emerges. Headings like "Why it matters" and "Finding clarity." Sentences that begin with "It's not about X, it's about Y." Sign-offs that tell you something is "a game-changer" or warn that ignoring it is "just noise." Before AI writing tools became mainstream, nobody wrote like this. These phrases didn't exist in corporate communications, and yet now they're everywhere, repeated across thousands of posts and articles, day after day.

The result is a feed where most content looks, sounds, and feels identical. Individual voices have been flattened into a single, oddly confident AI tone.

As someone who has spent years writing and editing content professionally, the signs are obvious to me. I can spot an AI-generated draft within a few sentences. Not because AI writes badly, but because it writes predictably.

If you want your brand's content to sound like your brand, to have a distinct voice that your audience recognises and remembers, that requires a human eye. A good PR professional won't just produce your content; they'll make sure it doesn't read like everyone else's.

The '“Who cares?” question

Many companies are using AI to produce more content than ever: blog posts, LinkedIn updates, press releases. The volume is up. But before a single word gets written, a good PR professional asks a question that most AI tools never will: "Who cares?"

It sounds blunt, but it's the most useful editorial filter there is. It's the question a journalist asks before deciding whether to cover a story. It's the question a reader asks, silently, before deciding whether to keep scrolling. And it's the question that separates content with a purpose from content that simply exists.

A PR professional thinks like an editor and like a customer at the same time. They ask what the audience needs to hear, not just what the business wants to say. That shift in perspective changes everything: the angle, the tone, the timing, and ultimately whether the content does any real work for your brand.

AI can produce a well-structured article in seconds. It cannot tell you whether anyone will care.

So where does that leave you?

If you're a growing tech company without an in-house communications person, you're likely either producing too little content, or producing content that isn't working hard enough for you. Bringing in more AI won't fix that on its own. The thinking has to come first.

That's what a good PR consultant brings. Not instead of AI, but alongside it.

I've spent years working in the South African tech sector, and I still believe that a well-placed story in the right publication, told by someone who understands your business and your audience, is worth more than a hundred generated posts.

The tools have changed. The fundamentals haven't.