Since joining the Forbes Technology Council and writing articles for the popular business publication, I’ve received a range of outreach. One particular message caught my eye. An AI-generated message asking whether I’d like to buy Forbes.
Not advertise on Forbes. Not even to write for it. To buy it. Never mind that I’m a Founder and CTO of a technology solution. You see, this person had clearly asked AI to generate a personalised message based on my profile and hadn’t done their due diligence. They clearly wrote a prompt, got slop back, and hit send .
There’s a word for messages like that. Slop – Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year. They define it as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” And their editors said “the word sends a little message to AI: when it comes to replacing human creativity, sometimes you don’t seem too superintelligent.”
Meanwhile, businesses of all shapes and sizes have jumped at the chance to automate as much of their operations as possible.
And that’s a great idea… Until you take it too far.
Handing too much over to AI usually means losing value
The idea makes sense in principle. AI automates the “boring stuff” so you can get it out the door faster and cheaper.
The problems start when ‘boring stuff’ stops meaning data gathering and admin tasks and starts meaning deliverables and client communications. At scale, this is surprisingly easy to let happen. For instance, let’s say you’re running twenty client accounts across three regions and your team is stretched. It’s easier to get AI to produce the quarterly report that used to be a day’s work. With AI taking four minutes to produce the same work, it’s decided that you will task AI with report creation.
However, the work that took a day often contains details that are missed from this automated approach. You end up with a generic, templated report and vague commentary that could apply across the board. The quality suffers and it’s only a matter of time before the client notices.
They say that everyone wants to write with AI, but no one wants to read AI writing. In fact, research from Raptive found that when people merely suspected content they were reading was AI-generated, 48% found it less trustworthy and 57% felt it was less authentic.
Every careless output you hand over to AI is a small withdrawal from client trust. Run that account down far enough and clients will head for the hills.
What clients are actually paying for
Why do people queue up and pay £4.50 for a coffee from a small independent roaster? Because they’re paying for something that feels considered, human, and worth it. In an age of infinite AI-generated content, craft, authenticity and trust become the differentiator.
So B2B service providers need to ask themselves whether their clients are attributing value to what they’re producing, or tuning it out as background noise?
There’s a real backlash against AI slop happening right now. In fact, the Edelman Trust Barometer puts AI trust in the US at just 32%. That means most of your clients are already reading AI-generated content with their guard up.
If you want a sense of how far that scepticism now reaches, NBC recently surveyed registered voters and found AI was viewed less favourably than ICE – an agency that has been the subject of nationwide protests for months. Which means demand for human-made content is strong enough that analysts at CNN Business have described 2026 as the year “100% human” becomes a marketing differentiator.
And the thing about working with B2B clients is that you don’t lose out on one transaction when a client decides your outputs feel low-effort. You lose a relationship that could’ve lasted for years.
Where to draw the line
For operations running at scale (global delivery teams, multiple client accounts, high-volume reporting cycles) the volume problem is real and AI genuinely helps manage it. But there needs to be a human in the loop for the deliverables and comms that are going to define your reputation.
That means drawing a line between the things that carry your reputation, and the processing work AI handles so well. Someone senior needs to read it before it goes out and ask, “would this tell them something they actually need to know, or is it just ticking a box?”
The trust you’ve built with your clients isn’t going to survive many thoughtless deliverables and templated emails. And when it’s lost, it won’t go with a bang. Your clients will just reassign the strategic work to someone else and keep you on for the transactional stuff. Then when your contract runs they’ll say goodbye.
In a world where generating content costs almost nothing, care is what has value. Being intentional about where human judgement sits in your operation is what separates the winners from the losers.
