By Matt Jones 

The first casualty of the AI revolution is certainty, not jobs.

A year ago, if someone published a thoughtful article or a beautifully written LinkedIn post, our default assumption was that they’d probably written it themselves. Today, even genuinely original work is met with a shrug and a dismissive ‘ChatGPT probably wrote that’. I wonder how many readers have already thought that about this piece. 

This is a problem that leaders around the world are grappling with because the paradox they’re facing is profoundly challenging. At exactly the moment when leaders are now needed to become storytellers-in-chief for their businesses, helping brands cut through the sea of same and slop, storytelling itself has become infinitely easier to fake. Good words have become abundant. Polished outputs have become cheap. And trust is becoming harder than ever to earn as a result.

For years, content marketing rewarded finished products. The keynote. The article. The campaign. The white paper. The beautifully edited video. Increasingly, I believe that the more valuable content is everything that happens before those things. The notes. The sketches. The dead ends. The first draft. The thinking out loud. In other words, the working and the messy middle in between first thought and final product. 

Facing a barrage of increasingly convincing fakes, luxury brands understood this long before most brand marketers did. The Hermès artisans don’t simply hand-stitch a bag, but leave subtle traces of the person who made it. Tiny variations. Individual marks. Evidence that a human pair of hands spent hours making something another human being could never reproduce exactly. The imperfections amplify the value rather than diminish.

It’s a fascinating inversion. For decades, creative and marketing technology has encouraged us to hide the process and present only the polished result. AI pushes that logic to its conclusion. Anyone can now produce polished results. Which means the process suddenly becomes the interesting bit.

That thought was sitting in the back of my mind when I decided to launch a podcast earlier this year. The world didn’t need another podcast. It certainly didn’t need another middle-aged strategist talking into an expensive microphone. But after more than 20 years making a living through words, first writing political speeches, then building brands, I realised something uncomfortable. People could no longer tell whether my thinking was actually mine.

The answer wasn’t to write more (except here, clearly). It was to think out loud. Not because speaking is somehow more authentic than writing, but because conversation exposes something polished prose often hides. Hesitation, interaction, curiosity, half-formed ideas, those lovely moments when you can hear an argument or idea change shape in real time. In short, the working.

One of my first guests on my new podcast was Zara Seidler, co-founder of The Daily Aus. We ended up talking less about journalism than about the trust it depends on. As news sources become harder to trust (thanks to social media, deepfakes, AI and every other force pulling at the fabric of public confidence), The Daily Aus has started showing more of how its journalism gets made. The research and the preparation before the interviews. The editorial decisions behind the outputs. Not because audiences are fascinated by the process for its own sake, but because seeing the work helps people trust the result.

I wonder how many other industries are heading in the same direction. What if the most persuasive content your business produces isn’t the finished case study, but the workshop where the idea emerged? What if customers trust the prototype more than the product launch? What if the conversation with the client becomes more valuable than the presentation?

For years, we were taught to hide the messy middle and only reveal the answer once we’d nailed it. AI has started to flip that logic. The competitive advantage has shifted to something much harder to synthesise: visible thinking. Not performative vulnerability. Not ‘behind-the-scenes’ content for its own sake. But genuine evidence that there are still curious humans asking difficult questions, changing their minds and doing the work. Maybe that’s what audiences are really looking for now. Not perfection, but proof of work.

Matt Jones is the founder of StoryWork. 

Image: Supplied.

Read more: Have content marketers reached peak social?