I've started to see a growing trend in businesses. More and more senior leaders are using AI to produce internal materials, and they're genuinely pleased with the results. The documents look polished and professional, but anyone familiar with AI-generated writing can spot the signs.
Listen, I can understand why leaders are impressed. AI can produce in seconds what may have taken someone an hour to write. It organizes ideas, improves awkward sentences and turns a few scattered thoughts into something that looks complete. If you are staring at a blank page, that can feel extraordinary. The concern is not that leaders are using AI. I use it, and our team at Bark uses it. The concern is that we can easily mistake a finished-looking document for finished thinking.
AI is very good at producing language that sounds credible. Give it a few instructions and it will confidently generate a campaign, announcement, strategy or vision statement. While you can train it to understand your organization's history, it rarely knows why one word fits your business and another changes its meaning. It has no real investment in your reputation and no responsibility for what happens after something is published.
Unless AI is given strong direction, it usually pulls language toward the middle. The writing may be grammatically sound, but it begins to sound like everything else. Organizations suddenly find themselves navigating changing landscapes, fostering meaningful connections and empowering people to pursue brighter futures. These expressions aren't necessarily false, but they're broad enough to belong to almost anyone. When your words could have come from any organization, they are no longer doing a very good job of representing yours.
That's where I'm really starting to see a lot of brand drift happening. It rarely comes from one disastrous decision. More often, it develops through dozens of small, seemingly harmless ones. A leader generates an announcement without involving the communications team, or someone else creates a sales email from a prompt. I've seen untrained staff members producing their own social posts, graphics, presentations and policies (and to them, they think it's amazing). Each item may seem acceptable when viewed alone, but over time the organization starts speaking in several voices. Claims change slightly, priorities become less clear and the distance between what the organization believes and how it presents itself begins to widen.
For a business, this deserves particular care because language does more than support marketing. It communicates who you are, what you value and why customers should trust you. A sentence can be polished and still lack strategic clarity. It can sound impressive while overstating what a company does. It can replace the honest stories and experiences of real customers with vague, manufactured claims. If that kind of language is repeated often enough, brand drift can slowly weaken the trust and distinctiveness a business has worked hard to build.
The solution I'm proposing is not to prohibit AI. It's an exceptionally useful tool when placed in capable hands. The solution is for leadership to establish how it should be used and where its authority ends. Staff need to know what information can be entered into an AI system, what kinds of content require professional review and who is responsible for protecting the organization’s voice. They also need to understand that the ability to generate content does not automatically make that content accurate, strategic or suitable for publication.
This responsibility begins with senior leadership. A CEO or senior executive should set the standard for thoughtful AI use, but that doesn't mean becoming the organization’s chief copywriter. While AI can be incredibly useful, it can also tempt leaders to bypass the people they hired to manage the brand.
A marketing or communications leader sees more than the paragraph on the screen. That person is considering the audience, timing, voice, positioning and relationship between the new message and everything the organization has already said. A CEO may read an AI-generated piece and think, “That sounds good.” The Marketing Director (or brand ambassador) should be asking whether it sounds like the organization, whether it is strategically sound and whether it should be communicated at all. Those are different questions, and they require experience and judgment.
If you've entrusted someone to oversee your marketing, allow that person to do their job. Bring ideas to the team, including ideas developed with AI, but do not reduce the marketing role to cleaning up material after the important decisions have already been made. Good marketing leadership is not simply about improving sentences. It's about guarding clarity, consistency and trust.
The widespread availability of AI doesn't reduce the need for professional oversight. I believe it increases it. When almost anyone can produce something that looks reasonably polished, organizations need people who can recognize shallow thinking, generic language, factual errors and subtle departures from the brand. Someone still needs to know the difference between content that sounds impressive and communication that's actually wise.
At Bark, we believe technology should remain a servant, never a substitute for wisdom, discernment or leadership. Our AI policy allows AI to support research, brainstorming, analysis and drafting, while keeping strategy, accountability and final decisions in human hands. That's not because we distrust the technology, but because we understand what it is and what it is not.
Leaders should use AI, become familiar with it and help their teams use it well. They should also put clear safeguards in place before enthusiasm outruns judgment. Your organization’s voice has been shaped through years of work, relationships, decisions and earned trust. AI can help you communicate that story really well when used appropriately.
