There’s a claim doing the rounds right now.
It sounds smart.
It gets nodded at in marketing webinars and repeated by consultants who charge a lot to tell you things you could have figured out yourself or Googled.
It gets repeated in bland faux-bold LinkedIn posts that urge you to comment with “Level up” or something like that in order to get a Claude-generated 5 page PDF full of bullshit.
The claim is this: leveraging AI is the differentiator.
Here’s the problem with that, and it’s quite separate from the fact that I despise both of those words; “leveraging” and “differentiator”.
If you are “leveraging AI”, and I am “leveraging AI”, and the person two LinkedIn posts above yours is also “leveraging AI”, then what, exactly, are any of us “differentiating” from?
This is a basic logical failure.
A differentiator differentiates.
So, if the entire market has access to the same tools and most of them are using them, you don’t have a differentiator. You have a commodity. And you are doing the same things as everyone else, and just increasing your workload while producing a bunch of boring, bland, vanilla sameness, but hey, it’s all good, because we ‘leveraged AI’ to do it.
Screw that.
What’s Actually Happening Out There
What AI-as-differentiator has mostly produced is a very particular flavour of content.
You’ve seen it, and everyone else has seen it.
It has a warm, confident tone. It uses phrases like “in today’s fast-paced landscape” and “leveraging cutting-edge solutions”, (again with the damn “leveraging”).
It’s a six-line-long reply to a 2 word comment, and it closes by asking what you think, what’s your experience with this, comma, <your name>.
It opens with a rhetorical question and ends with an invitation to book a discovery call.
It contains no factual errors and no typos.
It is, structurally, fine. Just fine.
It is also completely and entirely indistinguishable from the ten posts above it, the twelve posts below it, and the four newsletters you deleted this morning without opening.
Because this is what happens when you outsource the thinking to the tool. You get output that sounds like output. And output is a dirty word here.
Monkey copies monkey, and everyone politely pretends the jungle is full of original thought.
The irony is that using AI to generate content you could not otherwise generate is not “leverage”. It’s just noise, produced faster.
So what can you do about it?
What AI Actually Is
Let me be clear about what AI is good for, because this isn’t an anti-AI argument.
AI is genuinely useful. I use it.
It is a production layer. It is fast, tireless, and excellent at taking something and turning it into more of that something — restructured, reformatted, rephrased.
It’s great at boring drudgery, like taking the raw transcript of a real conversation or a voice note and pulling five posts out of it.
It can take a rough paragraph of your actual thinking and make it publishable.
It can do for me in twenty seconds what would otherwise take me two hours.
What it cannot do is have the original thought in the first place.
It cannot tell you about the client who came to you having tried the same approach twice and failed both times, and what that taught you about why the obvious solution is usually the wrong one.
It cannot replicate the pattern recognition that comes from fifteen years of watching the same mistakes get made across different industries.
It cannot fake the specific detail that only someone who was actually in the room would know.
It cannot actually have lived the experience itself, like, for example, an AI can’t actually have had an abusive client whom it fired, only to take them back, then fire them again, and then it packed its bags and went off to California for a couple of weeks.
No, it can’t; I lived that experience, because in the ageless words of Ralph Fiennes’ wife in In Bruges, “It’s an inanimate fucking object.”
And listen, readers can tell. Not always, not right away, not consciously, but they can tell.
Content generated from experience has texture and timbre and all kinds of other gushy-feely things that I don’t have words for.
Content generated from a prompt has none of this. It’s just content. It’s just “output”. And it may as well just say Lorem Ipsum.
So What Actually Is the Differentiator?
The differentiator is what you put in before the AI touches it.
It’s the accumulated weight of your experiences; what you’ve seen, the bets you’ve made and won or lost, the times you were wrong and why.
It’s the opinion you hold that makes some people uncomfortable. It’s the way you explain a concept that finally makes it land for someone who’s heard it ten times before and never quite got it.
That is what gets forwarded, shared, screenshot, and remembered. Not because it was well-formatted, but because it was real.
Because you can get AI to write a 10,000 word article, but no one will actually read and enjoy it, and then here I am posting a crap photo of me sitting in a Dingli tyre shop with my Mazda, with a silly caption about remote work, and it gets seen 8,000 times, and hoovers up a 100 likes, in 24 hours.
Why? Because AI couldn’t give you that insight because it doesn’t actually live anything. AI hasn’t ever sat on an uncomfortable chair in a tyre shop and got that idea, that “Hang on, this could be a great post about my life, informed by my actual lived experiences”.
AI can help you do more with your lived experiences, your actual knowledge, the things that make you human and make you an expert and that you get paid to do or advise on.
It can help you produce it faster, distribute it further, and repurpose it across formats without starting from scratch every time. That is valuable.
But if you skip the human layer and go straight to the tool without bringing your actual knowledge, perspective, and experience to the table — you’re not “leveraging AI”.
You’re outsourcing your thinking to something that doesn’t think, and hoping nobody notices. But they will.
What This Means in Practice
The people who will actually stand out over the next few years are not the ones who adopted AI fastest.
It’s the ones who already had something worth saying and used AI to say it more effectively.
The “differentiator” is your expertise (dammit how I hate this word). Your point of view. Your “hot takes” or rather, your willingness to say the thing that the people in your industry are dancing around.
AI can help you get it out of your head and into a format people will read but it cannot put it in your head in the first place. At least, I hope it can’t because if so, you have bigger problems, bro.
That part is still, inconveniently but thanks fully, yours to do. Now go out and live, and then prompt.
Mark Debono is a communications advisor for founders, C-levels, and B2B brands who want to build a presence that’s actually theirs. [Work with Mark →]
