Your CEO is addicted to using AI for thought leadership? Here’s how to get around it
“Of course I used AI…I write everything using AI.” Billionaire hedge fund pro Stanley Druckenmiller brushed off his AI-written thought leadership piece in the Wall Street Journal. “I don’t know why this is relevant,” he said. “My name is on the piece. It’s my message.”
The Atlantic criticized the blasé attitude and asked: Has AI Writing Entered Its Post-Shame Era?
Are we dumbing down thought leadership with AI slop?
We get it. Writing is hard. Billionaires are busy. But to do thought leadership, you need thoughts. Your own thoughts. Not AI's.
As a PR agency that helps companies do thought leadership properly, we have a stake in this. Our call to action to CEOs everywhere is simple: talk to us. Share your actual thoughts -- not a summary version from ChatGPT's AI.
The CEO stopping themselves from becoming a thought leader? More common than you’d think
The Wall Street Journal reported that in July 2026, 81% of sampled long-form LinkedIn posts masquerading as thought leadership were flagged as AI-generated.
Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke pointed out that these ‘slop grenades’ hurt productivity by pushing hours of AI editing onto someone else on the team.
This definitely applies not just to business emails or Slack chats, but to effectively leaderless thought leadership by AI. Seriously, ChatGPT can write your thought leadership, but can’t make you seem smart.
There’s already a whole ecosystem of AI detection tools newspapers are using to prevent exactly the problem that the WSJ ran into with the Stanley Druckenmiller column. So clearly, the age of CEOs faking their way into genius status is rapidly coming to an end. (Not soon enough, I’d say).
But in the next 6 months to a year where founders might still try this, a PR pro like myself asks: are they just lazy? Is that why they’re so darn intent on letting AI do their thinking for them in public? Or is there something more going on here?
Seems like there’s something more going on.
Why CEOs reach for ChatGPT or Claude to help them draft their thought leadership
One reason is simple economics. The CEO’s salary might be $600 per hour. So they want to spend their time on “CEO stuff,” not “PR stuff…” because they don’t quite get what PR is anyway (and grudgingly let their VP of Marketing hire a PR agency) so don’t value it.
As in, “I’m too busy growing the company and putting out fires right and left. You don’t even understand the pressure I’m under. If a reporter wants an interview, fine. But if you want to write some thought leadership bafflegab, go ahead. I don’t need to be there.”
If that’s the case, what we have here is a failure by the head of marketing. They haven’t explained to the CEO how PR and thought leadership connects to ROI. They haven’t shown how earned media coverage and a bigger brand awareness in general, helps them win more deals and grow revenue.
That’s pretty common.
But it’s not the only reason why CEOs and founders are increasingly (despite everyone hating AI slop) turning to AI to “do” thought leadership without doing any thinking.
Getting past the marketing team’s overprotectiveness of the CEO
The CEO probably hired an internal PR pro or an outside agency on the advice of their VP of Marketing. But sometimes (if that head of marketing doesn’t know how to get faster results with their PR agency) that same person can be the obstacle to producing thought leadership.
“Look, I only get maybe one meeting a week with our CEO,” said a VP of Marketing. She was our main point of contact at a gigantic enterprise SaaS company working with manufacturers.
“He’s one of these alpha dogs. He’s too busy, you know, in investor meetings, product meetings, he’s basically running inside sales on his own.... You’re going to be lucky to get one meeting a month with him – and to be honest, I don’t think you’re getting that.”
Hoooold on. This wasn’t about economics.
This was about the VP maintaining a sense of favored status with the CEO. The VP of Marketing saw their primary role as protecting the CEO’s time – not building the company’s brand. It was about protecting their ‘special relationship’ – and not letting some pesky PR pro get in the way.
Long-term, putting up obstacles to getting even the occasional brief with the CEO would be self-defeating.
Without access to the CEO’s insights, there would be no thought leadership. And a lot of pitch ideas would fall flat without the CEO’s input (This VP of Marketing also didn’t feel like they could act as a spokesperson in the CEO’s stead, so that was out).
A bad PR experience would not reflect well on the VP of Marketing, since they recommended us in the first place.
This wasn’t going to end well for her. But our PR agency would inevitably get fired, first.
What to do? We were seemingly down to a few really bad options.
Ghostwrite the CEO’s thought leadership without any input and inevitably produce something generic, maybe with the help of AI.
Second (also bad) option: Use AI 100 percent to come up with some slop and try to push that on an unsuspecting magazine.
So we didn’t do either.
When the CEO won’t do thought leadership and you don’t want AI to do the talking, go looking for other smart people
The CEO wouldn’t talk to us. And frustratingly, the VP of Marketing would not let us into their circle of trust. So… we went hunting for someone who would talk.
The VP of Marketing had already turned down a few requests for us to talk to some subject matter experts, without good reason.
(Boy, do I hate bureaucracy and office politics that get in the way of good PR and anything else.)
So we’d have to go around her.
I had a particular expert in mind.
I’d only chanced to meet this gigantic company’s Chief of Operations (COO) on the initial onboarding call with this PR client. He actually wasn’t supposed to be there. Usually, it’s the CEO and the VP of Marketing and maybe the in-house person who handles social media. But Tom sort of invited himself.
Tom the COO was the kind of guy who just liked to know what was going on at the company. He wasn’t into silos. If he needed something, he’d bug anyone in any department. He even had a reputation for being kind of, well, annoying to the other department heads for intruding on their fiefdoms.
On that initial onboarding call months back, I remembered he asked thoughtful questions about our process.
Tom seemed to get it. He was curious about PR and marketing, asking about strategy, story ideas, media targeting, etc., even though his actual day job was more about managing products and engineers and keeping accounts payable in line.
The dude stuck out in my brain.
On a whim, I had our team create a PR pitch that would require data only this guy could provide. (Bonus: Check out our guide to pitch reporters so that they’ll actually tell your story).
We got him on a call. It took 5 minutes to grab the answers.
That was nice, but that wasn’t really what he was there for.
“Tom, this is great stuff,” I said. “Now, I have a hunch and you tell me if this is right: this isn’t the first time you’ve come up with a clever solution like this for a company. I mean, you’re always solving problems just like this one. I looked you up. You’ve got a ton of experience. You got an MBA from Harvard. You’re a guy who knows things. Is that right?”
Tom the COO spent the next 15 minutes talking about how he’d solved very similar, gigantic problems for companies at different stages. It was like we’d poked a hole in a dyke. It just poured out of him.
A thought leadership star was born… and AI had nothing to do with it
If you don’t quite know who to use for thought leadership, go looking.
We’d struck gold with Tom.
We edited his comments down (which wasn’t hard since he had added almost zero fluff). That afternoon, we had a thought leadership article to present to the VP of Marketing, with Tom’s name in the byline.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Oh, we’re going to pitch this to that magazine we discussed earlier. We were going to pitch the CEO’s article, but it seems like he’s busy, yeah? Turns out Tom had some great ideas.”
“You should have come to me first,” she said – with more than a hint of menace.
“Yeah, we should have,” I said. “Um, do you like the piece?”
She kept reading, then shrugged. “Fine. If we can use it, let’s use it.”
So we used it. Sent it off to Fast Company.
Rejected. Oh well. It happens.
Next, we threw Tom’s thought leadership piece at an editor at Inc. magazine, who we knew from some recent bits of media coverage for a different client.
Success! And that first success led to two more thought leadership pieces from Tom over the next couple of months. The VP of Marketing was ever-so-pleased with the results.
And the cherry-on-top? That busy CEO who didn’t have time to even speak to us before? Now he was asking his VP of Marketing to make sure we had twice-monthly briefings to bounce around ideas for his own thought leadership.
Want to turn thought leadership into PR gold? Need help unlocking your ideas so you can grow your business? Contact the Mind Meld PR agency today
