Tyler Suomala is the Founding father of Growthitect, the place he helps structure agency homeowners improve charges, construct constant lead flows, and win high-quality purchasers.
Everybody has the identical instruments now. AI can write your challenge descriptions. It might draft your weblog posts. It might generate social captions, electronic mail sequences, web site copy and thought management articles earlier than your morning espresso will get chilly.
And so the temptation is clear. If it used to take you 4 hours to write down a single LinkedIn submit, and now you may publish 30 in the identical time, why wouldn’t you? Quantity wins, proper? Not precisely.
Quantity isn’t inherently unhealthy. In case your agency has been posting as soon as a month (or worse, as soon as 1 / 4), then sure, extra content material goes to assist. Going from near-invisible to persistently current makes an actual distinction. No person’s arguing that. However there’s a tipping level, and most companies blow proper previous it with out noticing.
That tipping level is when quantity begins changing high quality as a substitute of amplifying it. When the bar for “adequate” drops as a result of publishing is less complicated. Whenever you cease asking “Does this sound like us?” and begin asking “Is that this sufficient to submit?”
That shift is delicate. You received’t see it in any single submit. However over weeks and months, you begin shedding the factor that made a possible consumer cease scrolling and assume, “I need to work with these individuals.” Your voice. Your viewpoint. The persona behind the work. And as soon as that’s gone, it’s actually exhausting to get again.
AI Produces the Excellent Common
Black Ocean Firehouse by Rafael de Cárdenas / Structure at Giant, New York Metropolis, New York
Right here’s what occurs if you hand your advertising and marketing over to AI:
By design, AI generates the very best common of the whole lot it is aware of. The perfect common.
Which means in case you immediate it to write down a challenge description, you get one which seems like each different challenge description it’s ever been educated on. Polished, competent, and utterly forgettable. In the event you’re utilizing AI the identical means everybody else is (similar prompts, similar workflows, similar “write me a LinkedIn submit about sustainable design”), then your content material goes to converge with everybody else’s.
When 90% of companies are utilizing AI the identical means, the output seems, sounds and feels the identical. You assume you’re differentiating if you’re truly converging.
Structure already struggles with differentiation. Most agency web sites might swap logos, and also you’d by no means know the distinction. The “About” pages all learn the identical, and challenge descriptions test the identical bins. The identical goes for social posts. And that was earlier than AI entered the image. Now take that present sameness and add a instrument that, by its very nature, pushes the whole lot towards the middle. You may see the place that is heading…
When purchasers can’t inform companies aside, they default to the one differentiator left: worth. That’s commoditization. That’s the race to the underside that each architect says they need to keep away from, however few are actively doing something to stop. And the irony is that the instrument many companies are adopting to “enhance” their advertising and marketing is the very factor making it tougher to face out.
AI isn’t inflicting this by itself, however it’s accelerating it. And most companies don’t even notice it’s occurring as a result of the content material seems good. It reads wonderful. It’s grammatically appropriate and professionally polished. However “professionally polished” and “distinctly yours” are two very various things.
Higher Is Higher
Black Ocean Firehouse by Rafael de Cárdenas / Structure at Giant, New York Metropolis, New York
So how do you employ AI with out shedding your self within the course of? You flip the sequence.
Most companies are doing it backwards. They begin with AI and hope the output is sweet sufficient. They let the instrument outline the voice, the tone, the message. Then they tweak just a few phrases and hit publish. And so they do that time and again, week after week, till someday they take a look at their web site and their socials and their proposals and notice none of it seems like them anymore. All of it seems like AI. Which implies all of it seems like everybody.
The companies that can truly stand out are doing the other. They outline what “higher” seems like for themselves first, after which they make that model of higher repeatable with AI. The excellence and order of occasions make an enormous distinction.
In the event you begin with AI and work backwards, you find yourself on the imply. You find yourself in the course of the pack. You find yourself sounding like each different agency that took the shortcut. However in case you begin with your self (your precise voice, your precise perspective, the way in which you truly discuss to purchasers if you’re at your finest) after which use AI to scale that? Now you’ve received one thing price scaling.
Earlier than you ever open ChatGPT or Claude or no matter instrument you’re utilizing, it is advisable to get clear on just a few issues. What does your agency truly sound like? What you sound like in a pitch, in a consumer assembly, in a dialog with a colleague you belief. What’s your viewpoint on structure, on how buildings ought to serve individuals, on what makes a challenge price doing? And the place are the boundaries? The place does AI assist, and the place does it have to cease?
If AI can’t pull these solutions out of your immediate or its reminiscence, it’s going to fill within the blanks with the common. And also you received’t even discover it occurring till it’s already occurred.
As soon as these issues are outlined (actually outlined, not simply vaguely understood), AI turns into an amplifier as a substitute of a substitute. It takes your voice and makes it extra constant, extra scalable, extra environment friendly. However the voice remains to be yours. That’s the entire level; with out that basis, you’re simply producing content material.
You must know who you’re and what you consider earlier than you AI or automate something. Your expertise. Your perspective. Your style. Your conviction about what good structure truly means. These issues have to return from you. They must be outlined by you. And so they must be protected by you, particularly because the instruments get extra highly effective and the temptation at hand over the keys will get stronger.
Extra content material isn’t the reply; higher content material is. And higher begins with you, not with a immediate.
