“It’s like saying, ‘Give a man a Les Paul, and he becomes Eric Clapton.’ It’s not true.” Though these words came from the mouth of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters 53 years ago, they would still have complete relevance if uttered today. They feature in the newly-restored Pink Floyd at Pompeii, just re-released.
Tools Don’t Maketh the Musician
Waters is making a point about how both expensive gear and new music technology are inconsequential if the person using them doesn’t have the skill. Technological advancements since Waters’ comments mean that today anybody could produce an album on their iPhone in their own living room using software like Pro Tools. But how many unheralded artists have come from the box room at home to produce something that outstrips Floyd’s wonderful and weird “The Dark Side of the Moon” or Jimi Hendrix’s “Electric Ladyland”?
This also applies to technological advancement in clothing and other accessories. Earlier, an email from Zoot hit my inbox exhorting me to “step into speed.” I have two of their eye-catching and comfortable triathlon suits and am well aware that the only thing that’s going to help me speed up this summer is improved fitness. You could probably knock a few kilos and a decade or so off me too.
The AI Creep
The tension in the dynamic between man and machine has tightened recently with the adoption of AI into mainstream life. It’s both frightening and exciting. Not a week passes without yet another article about whether or not you’ll have work in a year’s time. What were once rock-solid professions like law and accounting are under threat. Last year’s wave of redundancies in one high-profile professional services firm was driven by AI hoovering up certain work tasks.
I’m using AI in my own business. The ScoreApp software which powers the scorecards on my website is powered by AI. When I was designing them the AI in the software sped up the process of brainstorming questions and suggesting potential frameworks. It gave me a shot in the arm initially and then I tailored everything so that it made sense to my world view. In fact, I rewrote and reframed everything as my method is unique to me.
If I was presenting something generic there wouldn’t be a need to change anything. AI saves me a heap of time sourcing information, so I use it for research and brainstorming. If I can’t find the appropriate word to describe something it usually comes to the rescue.
I’m not sure an AI, at the moment, is in the position to write a piece the way I do. How is it going to source the Roger Waters’ quote or the triathlon example? Of course it will probably present me with the tools to speed up how I feed in that sort of information to compose a piece. But I’m not comfortable outsourcing my thinking or style, especially when it comes to writing in order to influence.
When AI Weakens the Message
On the subject of writing to influence—I was recently stress testing one of my client’s proposals for a seven-figure contract renewal. One piece, which was very important regarding knitting the entire solution together, was missing something. I knew the guy who wrote it very well and technically he knew his onions better than most. Though he wasn’t the strongest writer he’d produced much better content in the past. We had a chat and I discovered that he fired everything into AI in order to generate content so that he could get back to his work. What came out was pasteurised, sterile and no better than anything a competitor would produce if they did the same thing. It put the entire renewal at risk if it remained in that condition. The content was lacking depth, detail and nuance. It was an empty calorie—a ghost even—which led to the question “is this really you?”
By the way, never put proprietary information into an AI. Yes, there are settings that allow you to stop the AI from incorporating the content into its learning models but after umpteen scandals—Cambridge Analytica, anyone—do you really trust them?
Buyers everywhere have noticed that the quality of the written word in proposals has ratcheted up recently – and it’s entirely down to AI. The main concern is whether the proposals they receive are an accurate portrayal of what an organisation has to offer.
In the May/June 2025 edition of the Harvard Business Review an article, “Why CEOs Should Think Twice Before Using AI to Write Messages” describes research carried out at Zapier. It wanted to establish whether employees could distinguish between genuine comments written by the CEO Wade Foster and those generated by AI. Based on the research findings the writer of the article concludes that “in simple terms, people place more trust in and find more value in statements they believe come from a human rather than technology.”
With this in mind, an astute buyer who determines that the proposal has been generated by AI is less likely to trust what’s on offer, as it will either embellish capability or else, as we’ve seen, diminish it through the writer’s laziness and poor prompting. Buyers who aren’t sceptical and rigorous risk buying a crock of horse manure and wasting their own company’s—or even taxpayers’—money.
Trust Wins Major Contracts
Don’t forget that a proposal, in theory, demonstrates that you can technically do the work, whereas the pitch allows the buyer to fire bullets into your solution, as well as seeing what you’re really like to work with. In future I expect that buyers will place a higher emphasis on presentations as well as physically validating competence on site.
Winning major contracts is driven by trust and influence. This is built steadily over time through cultivating a solid client relationship, a bulletproof reputation in the market, developing a healthy respect for your competition and an excellent value proposition. At competition time all of this is packaged into an authentic proposal. If a buyer winds up asking the question “is this really you, or just an illusion?” when reading the proposal it means that a gap in trust and intimacy has opened that will be very difficult to close.
AI isn’t going away, so be sure to master the tools on offer that make life easier, speed up your work and improve your thinking. But be careful that what you produce doesn’t detract from your essence and leave someone asking, “is this really you?”
Back to the Human Touch
To conclude, I’m going to revisit Pink Floyd. Last October I was lucky enough to see David Gilmour play the ruins of Circus Maximus beside the Roman Forum. It was a bucket list show for me as I never saw the Floyd play live. My hands didn’t touch a camera all night and my partner took all the photos. I marvelled at how a 78 year old could still perform at that level and convey such feeling and emotion from playing just one note on his guitar. I had goosebumps and the hairs on my arms stood at some of the sounds that seared through the Roman night. Will an AI ever make me feel that way? I don’t think so. That was no illusion. It really was him playing that guitar.
