Take everything you ever learned and practiced about business communication and throw it out the window. Because of the AI revolution, the world of “content” is now upside-down and inside-out. Until recently, you likely strove for perfection and polish in your slide presentations, emails, Slack messages, marketing images, social posts, blog posts, LinkedIn profile, video calls, resumes and cover letters. Doing so signaled value in the form of competence, experience, and ability. But now, communicating with perfection and polish signals a lack of value. It signals that you used AI. Speaking to Instagram influencers, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri last week announced the dawn of this new world. In posts on Instagram and Threads , he said that, “Deepfakes are getting better and better. AI is generating photographs and videos indistinguishable from captured media. The feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything.” Here’s his main point: “AI makes polish cheap.” It’s “cheap to produce and boring to consume. “People want content that feels real,” he wrote. “In a world where everything can be perfected, imperfection becomes a signal. Rawness isn’t just aesthetic preference anymore. It’s proof” that you’re offering authenticity, reality, value. Mosseri was talking to online creators. But his insights go double for business professionals. Corporate communication is now being flooded with cheap, polished words and images. And if you communicate without AI, but in a polished way, others will assume it’s ChatGPT talking, not you. The people who, in Mosseri’s words, “can maintain trust and signal authenticity — by being real, transparent, and consistent — will stand out.” A related trend is that as more communicators offload the thinking and creation to AI, the more homogenized, generic, and average everything becomes. Being yourself in all communication is not only about authenticity, but individuality. By communicating in a way that only you can communicate, you increase your appeal and value in a world of generic, faceless, zero-personality AI content . For marketing communications, this goes double. The public will increasingly assume what they see is AI-generated, and therefore cheap garbage. McDonald’s faced backlash last month after releasing an AI-generated Christmas commercial titled “The Worst Time of the Year.” Critics were not lovin’ it and slammed the video as “disjointed,” “uncanny,” and “stupefying.” McDonald’s was forced by the public backlash to remove the content, which damaged the company’s reputation. In both November 2024 and November 2025, Coca-Cola used AI to recreate its old “Holidays Are Coming” commercials. The ads were slammed for being “soulless,” “dystopian,” and “devoid of any actual creativity.” Car blog Jalopnik pointed out that the truck in the ad had 10 different axle configurations during the 60-second commercial. I believe that half the reaction was to the actual content quality, and half was simply the knowledge that these huge companies used AI, which is assumed to be cheap, fast, and easy. The move signaled they were just “phoning it in,” not offering any kind of creative thinking. Not only will the public reject what they assume to be AI, the social algorithms will increasingly reward and boost content offering the signals of authenticity. In fact, Mosseri said that within Meta there is a push to prioritize “original content” over “templated“ or “generic“ AI content that is easy to churn out at a massive scale. But by all means, use AI ChatGPT went live on Nov. 30, 2022. In the ensuing three years, the public learned that LLM-based generative AI could magically do stuff for us so we didn’t have to do it. But now that everybody is magically doing stuff, stuff isn’t magic anymore. This is the year we completely change our relationship to AI. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has some useful ideas about this, which he included in a blog post titled, “ Looking Ahead to 2026 .” Rather than thinking of AI as a tool that replaces work and workers, we should think of it as a “scaffolding for human potential,” a way to magnify our cognitive capabilities, not replace them. In other words, instead of viewing AI as something that writes and creates pictures so we don’t have to or writes code so we don’t have to — meaning we don’t even have to learn how to code — we need to use AI to become great at writing, creating images and coding. From now on, everyone will assume everyone else has and uses AI. Content and communications will always exist on a spectrum from fully AI-generated to zero-AI human communication. The further toward the human any bit of content gets, the more valuable it will feel to both the receivers of the content and to the gatekeepers. There’s no fooling anyone anymore. That’s why it’s powerful to transparently disclose how you used it. This kind of disclosure engenders trust and credibility. I’ll give you an example. For this column, I used three AI-based tools. One is a tool called MyMind, in which I have been taking notes about various things on this topic I’ve read over the past month or two. It uses AI to auto-index and tag content, so you can find it quickly . I used Gemini 3 Pro via Kagi Assistant (disclosure: my son works at Kagi) both as a kind of search engine and to find the details about where and when tech leaders expressed the ideas I captured in my MyMind notes. And my word processor of choice is Lex , which has AI tools. After writing the column, I asked for advice on how I could improve it. I found a small number of its suggestions helpful and made some tweaks based on them. And I use it to spell-check and look for typos — that sort of thing. The truth is that AI has changed everything, including and especially our knowledge and expectations. We now live in a world where AI-generated content is cheap, easy, generic, boring and signals low value. Meanwhile, there’s only one you. It sounds mushy and cliché, but it’s increasingly true: the more you can show up as your authentic self, the more valuable you will be — and appear to be — to others. Be yourself. Express yourself. And forget about perfection and polish.