I'm a practitioner, not a guru. Everything below is what I actually believe after three years building a growth engine from scratch, and deleting 140,000 visitors a month on purpose.
AI lets you build the custom system those tools were faking, for a fraction of the cost, tailored to exactly how your team works. The $60k stack becomes a $3k one.
They charge fifteen to twenty grand a month to hand-deliver what a well-built system produces on a Sunday afternoon. The ones that survive will sell architecture, not output.
If your take could be generated by prompting a model with "write a post a CMO would agree with," it isn't thought leadership. It's thought followership.
The honest version: it already replaced the ones whose entire value was production. If your job was first drafts, formatting, and templated emails, that job is gone. What's left is judgment, strategy, and lived experience.
The average B2B blog post was already generic, keyword-stuffed, and written by someone who'd never used the product. AI didn't lower the bar. The bar was already on the floor.
The touch that matters is knowing which accounts to target, which content to kill, and when the output needs a rewrite. Not sprinkling personality on a post nobody asked to be entertained by.
Maybe they just want their question answered. The directness you're afraid of is the most human thing you can do.
Systems-Led Growth connects the pieces. AI runs the middle. Operators keep the judgment. The companies that win the next decade won't have the biggest teams or budgets. They'll have the best systems. Four things I'd stake it on:
AI can generate any content. It can't say the thing only you can say. That's the whole game now.
I built the growth engine at Copy.ai from scratch, the content system, the SEO and AEO strategy, the whole thing, then left to build my own. As of this year, fully independent.
I live in Cochrane, Alberta. Married, two kids. I train jiu-jitsu. I walk my beagle Zoomer at lunch, which is usually where I figure out what I actually think.
I have one test for everything I publish: would I say this out loud walking Zoomer, or only in a pitch deck? If it's the pitch deck, I rewrite it.
I build in public. The frameworks, the real numbers, and the parts that don't work yet. I document what I build.