4. Authenticity

As the race to automate everything using AI heats up, there's something organisations have forgotten. Their authentic voice.

It's essential in this noisy world where people are time-poor, distracted, overwhelmed and price-sensitive to make sure your brand stands out from an increasingly homogenous world.

Organisations need to let your personality, values, USPs and empathy shine by using your authentic voice across your digital estate to connect with your customers and prospects to create the most valuable asset a brand can have, advocacy.

While AI can certainly save you time and money, it's only as good as the prompt you give it. And it will be as authentic as your competitors, who also want to save time and money.

AI doesn't replace jobs, it raises the bar to make digital customer experiences better

AI isn't about taking the place of creativity and innovation, it's here to raise the game by using it to work smarter and braver. Especially when it comes to content.

It's not competing with AI. And using it shouldn't dilute the unique skills each person brings to the product lifecycle in an existential bid to stay relevant.

If AI is doing your job, and better, then you're not doing it right. That's why we use AI to raise the bar. To leverage the technology by writing prompts, designing conversations and answering specific problem statements to make content efficient..

Using AI to create siloed content that sits on a specific platform to fulfil a particular objective is an inefficient use of time and resources. And erodes the customer experience by:

• Introducing inconsistencies in messaging and presentation
• Causing a fractured and confusing interaction for the audience
• Wastes the time of a time-poor, distracted audience by repeating
• Losing branding and integrity in one click
• Doesn't easily point to an easy-to-fulfil solution, increasing cognitive load

Content is no longer design, it's content experience architecture.

What's content-led experience architecture?

All design should be content-led.

A designer couldn't possibly know what messaging should sit where, what that messaging needs to say (is it a sentence or an article) and how that messaging needs to be presented.

The role of a data scientist, solutions architect or the principal designer is meaningless unless you have content knitting all those disciplines together to create something meaningful, discoverable, authentic and engaging for both existing customers, external clients, stakeholders and prospects.

And a customer's experience doesn't start when they log in or tap 'buy', it starts at every interaction point.

This means a content experience architect (CAE) is a strategic generalist when it comes to writing content for different channels, functionality, formats, audiences and objectives. So your CAE will:

• Bridge digital delivery with marketing campaigns under the umbrella of brand
• Map the end-to-end journey from the customer's trigger point to every interaction
• Determine how the content is found and the next best action
• Ideate what that content should be and how it should be presented
• Create a messaging matrix for consistency across other products, services and brand activities
• Write and own the interaction journey

This includes chatbot, any integrated LLM into your website or app, and IVR for your customer service team.

AI is more than capable of doing the grunt work none of us enjoy doing, like hunting for stats and quotes. Or unblocking a writer's and ideas block. Using it like this means you:

• Improve the EEAT of your content by adding substance to your editorial and product pages
• Find content 'golden nuggets' to differentiate yourself from your competition
• Gain time ordinarily taken up with research
• Use it as a first check for legal, regulatory or compliance requirements
• Create basic visual assets when a graphic designer isn't available, like infographics or images

All of these will elevate your content to make it more engaging, credible and emotional, as the writer has more time to invest in the end-to-end journey, create content in different accessible formats and consider entry and exit points.

Under the watchful and strategic eye of the Content Experience Architect, you can bring your authentic self to the party. Make an impression so people will only want to come to your party.