Will Gen-AI Destroy Thought Leadership?

Bob Buday, High Octane Leadership Bob Buday: will generative AI destroy jobs in thought leadership? Is this gonna be a good profession, for the foreseeable future? And, if a company can say, we used to have, five editors and two researchers in our thought leadership group, and now ChatGPT can spit out white papers and collect secondary research and put out, we'll call it a research report, but it's really secondary research." Do we need, do we need these seven people, No, get rid of them.

​ Donald Thompson: Welcome to another episode of High Octane Leadership. Everyone is talking about AI, thought leadership, how to build and grow brands, and today, one of the things that we have is Mr. Bob Buday, who is really one of the co -founders, if you will, of thought leadership. Firms that survive AI aren't the ones producing the most content.

They're the ones whose ideas are too authentic to be ignored. My guest today is the closest thing to a thought leadership professional and its founding father that there is. In 1987, he was on the marketing team at CSC Index that turned business reengineering into a $5 billion consulting category. Before thought leadership was even a phrase that people used, he was implementing it, growing it, and using it as a sales generation tool with a brand-first mindset.

He co-founded The Bloom Group, one of the first, thought leadership agencies in 1998, and has also launched the Buday Thought Leadership Partners in 2020. His book that I have, just gotten through is "Competing on Thought Leadership" and has won 13 publishing awards. Welcome to High Octane Leadership. Bob Buday: thank you, Donald.

I really look forward to this as well. Donald Thompson: One of the things that, and we're gonna just dive into this really powerful topic, is some metrics, right? So when we think about the data that shows that eight out of 10 buyers believe that thought leadership shapes the way that they make decisions, but a much lower percentage, six out of 10 companies, believe that thought leadership is critical. That's a 20-point gap in understanding and expectation of the value of thought leadership.

I'd love for you to start just unpacking that value proposition and then that gap in understanding of the value of thought leadership. Bob Buday: Yes. what that data point, told us was that the, on average, IT services firms do not recognize how important thought leadership is to their clients in choosing which IT services firm they're going to use. So that 20-point gap was we asked the same question of buyers of IT services firm services and IT services firms themselves, and that question is: how important is thought leadership, among a, a bunch of factors, the company's brand, strong client references, et cetera, et cetera.

So 20-point gap between how, much the IT services firm felt thought leadership was important on the buyer's criteria, 20% less on the, seller side. So how do we explain that? i- in that sector, IT services, unlike the management consulting firms, the firms that were purely in the business of delivering advice, not of building systems that might follow that advice. But the management consulting firms, I would argue, have known this for many years, and that's why they were the, among the first, maybe the first sector to invest, heavily in thought leadership.

The IT services firms came second, and a lot of the IT services firms were drawn into this thought leadership war of showing how smart we are through our articles and speeches and all that. They were drawn into that war b-by after the acquisition of consulting firms. But in terms of sectors that have recognized the value of thought leadership, the... I would argue law firms in the US have been even later to the table to recognize the value of thought leadership, although today many of the, especially the big law firms, have thought leadership groups, especially the biggest ones Donald Thompson: One of the things that I'll extend on that point that you've made is, and I've seen in your book and some of the articles, is that thought leadership is not a marketing strategy.

It should be at the core of your business strategy. If you would unpack that thinking a little bit, I, think our audience would love to hear that Bob Buday: Sure. Especially in a professional services firm, a law firm, a consulting firm, an architecture firm, who's in the business of delivering expertise that they've built up over years and through research that they've conducted, in the business of delivering expertise delivered by people, right? The architects, the lawyers, the consultants, the, the engineers at an IT services firm.

knowledge is at the center of their business. Especially in today's AI era, the generative AI and agentic AI era, they have to create new expertise. So I look at thought leadership - Most people define thought leadership strictly as a marketing activity. "Oh, we write a white paper, we do a research report, we market that.

We get an article into a prestigious journal, and we market that, and then we get on social media and let people know they should read this article," and all that. a third of the game Okay? what happens before that, the primary research, which in my experience, really good primary research, and more specifically case study research, understanding what dozens of companies on the topic at hand, how they addressed some issue and how the companies that were most successful at addressing it, what they did differently when the companies that were least successful at addressing that issue.

That's primary research, okay? That's an activity that I would argue precedes thought leadership marketing After those big ideas, hopefully big ideas come out of that kind of research, then the ideas need to be marketed, and then the salespeople have to be trained about, we're getting leads now. Here's how to, respond to clients who say, "I loved your research report, now I wanna talk to somebody in your business." All right.

Salespeople have to be prepared about how to sell on the basis of that. But that's the creating the demand side of thought leadership. There's a supply side of thought leadership that I think almost everybody has not recognized to date. And the supply side of thought leadership is once you've created a big idea through your research, and you're a consulting firm or a law firm, et cetera, you need more than the authors of that research report or the authors of an article who can practice those ideas that are expressed in your game-changing research report.

You need more than the authors to be able to meet client demand for that expertise. Now, that may sound like, of course, Bob. No duh," but it often doesn't - it usually doesn't work that way. Donald Thompson: No, I, understand that point very clearly and in, in my role, my, my day job, if you will, I'm the managing director for the Center of Organizational Effectiveness at an organization called Telus Health.

And we are a multi-billion dollar organization that focuses on creating better workplaces for all and creating, support services and tools and strategies around reducing burnout, how to improve employee engagement, how to create better leadership that has a through line to the frontline professionals, all of these things that help people work and grow better. And so one of my questions would be, as we start to look at producing more and more thought leadership content, what are some of the strategies you've seen work well in taking that thought leadership content and preparing it down that supply chain for sales professionals to consume, for clinicians?

What are some of the things I should be looking out for or other folks that are listening, right? So that we do bridge that gap that you alluded to earlier Bob Buday: Sure. Okay, so let's talk about the demand side, which is marketing and selling. the marketing folks need to take your thought leadership content.

They need to alert the sales force, "We're gonna begin to market this on this date. we have - we're gonna try to, get people conference presentations, seminar presentations. We're gonna run webinars, and we, marketing, are gonna train you folks who sell the work and do the work. We're gonna, we're gonna give you a debrief on this intellectual capital that we've just developed that we hope the market really, responds to.

The leads that come in the door, they will have read this content. They will have said, "I really love your research study on, employee engagement," or, how to counsel people who have been laid off, how to help them prepare to have a, good career. Okay, great. Salespeople who respond to a call and the, and the pr- the prospect is saying, "I love that research report," and the salesperson has said, "Oh, I need to read it.

I guess I haven't read it." that can happen when marketing and sales are not on the same page. Okay? so that's the demand side, right?

On the supply side, if it turns out your phones are ringing off the hook or your email box is ringing off the hook and your salespeople are selling the heck out of this service, and it turns out you have five people in your company that can actually do the work, deliver the, the expertise that's behind this, this white paper or this research report that your clients fell in love with, I would argue you do not have a scalable service Okay? You have created a market for companies which are your competitors and have very rigorous internal methodology development and rigorous extensive training and, development services.

have given them a license to take away this great new idea that your firm brought to market, created and brought to market, and that's what happened with CSE Index. so the, number, I think it was 1995 or '96, Gartner said there was a $4.7 billion a year global market for business re-engineering services. Okay?

4.7 billion. The firm I worked at had 200 million of that, something like 4%. So competitors like Capgemini and McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group and AT Kearney, everybody jumped into the business re-engineering consulting business and said, "Oh, we've been doing it for years," and they'd been doing it for months.

They ran away with the market. and the company that really ran away, with it in the market was, Accenture, then known as Andersen Consulting, because Andersen Consulting had always made, large investments in internal methodology development and internal training and development. CSE Index just... Th- that wasn't in the culture.

It was creating new ideas Donald Thompson: So I really appreciate that because what you're talking about and the way I'm interpreting it is what is the through line from thought leadership development all the way through to the business impact, which is the type of thinking and conversation that C-suite leaders need to understand before they'll fully endorse it and understand, right? In terms of putting budget right behind the brilliance, right? It's one thing to have brilliant content, new ideas, all the things, but if we don't translate it into packages and processes and key messaging points that salespeople are comfortable executing and implementing, right?

And then have the supply to actually be able to deliver it, then we're just creating an appetite for .Something we can't ever fulfill, Because as a thought leader practitioner, as a content developer, we fall in love with our ideas, right? And what you're giving me is some real truth serum, because what the customer cares about is who can take that idea, put it into practice for me so I get the business benefit. And I don't care who originated it.

I care who can implement it at a fair price I can afford for the situation I'm in. And I think that for our audience is something to remember, is thought leadership is a part of a business flow, a revenue generation flow, not a single standalone entity of itself. That transitions now to what I view as a pretty significant threat to thought leadership, The advent of AI and Chat and Gemini and Claude and all these things is making everyone believe that they're a thought leader and putting out content.

What I'd love for you to share with our audience is what do you think the impact, of AI is on this space that you've built a, a career now and, now advise others on how to do it, and then what do we do to continue to stand out and differentiate? Bob Buday: I think, my view could change in two years because I think nobody really knows, right? nobody really knows. I don't really know.

that's never stopped me from having an opinion though, but Donald Thompson: Yeah, me neither Bob Buday: I think with generative AI, w- the way I see it right now, and I use generative AI. I don't know if you would call me - I'm, not a, an extensive user, and I'm not a light user. I'm somewhere in between. But, I think what it's going to do is...

let's talk about the thought leadership producer side, and then the thought leadership consumer are the executives who read, who, are more and more going to ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude and saying, "I have this problem." they used to go to the McKinsey site or the, the AT Kearney site or the BCG site and look for articles on this. but now they're going straight to the, LLMs, the generative AI tools, and they're saying, "I got this problem, and, what's the best, research and what's the best thinking on this?"

Okay. so on the thought leadership producer side, what I see generative AI doing is it's raising the playing field. Now, the inability to write clearly, is no longer a disadvantage. Generative AI can write pretty clearly, and, even that firm that has mediocre writers or mediocre contract writers, they can use these LLMs to improve the quality of their writing, okay?

That may not improve the quality of their ideas and insights, and I separate writing from ideas but everybody can sound, and I'm gonna put quotes around the word "smart" using these LLMs, these generative AI tools. A-anybody in 20 minutes on any topic can write a series of prompts, and with the right prompt say, "Give me 2,000 words for a white paper on topic X." Okay. It'll read pretty well.

Okay. Might there be anything new in it? Probably not, because it's just crawling what has been said before on the web. But it'll be well-written enough that the average executive can understand it.

so firms that c- were - wrote poorly, they have a tool now where their stuff can be understood. From the thought leaders producer side, you need to raise your level of, in terms of the quality of the content. You need to have very counterintuitive insights, novel insights, not what anybody else is saying, not what somebody could find by writing prompts into generative AI tools. You need a very different take on the problem in the world that your firm, is it addresses or problems and how to solve them.

Okay? So that raises the bar for, insights, which in turn means the folks who want to compete on the basis of thought leadership, they're gonna have to do more and better primary research on - that compares best and worst practice on, in companies out there on the topic at hand. they're gonna have to do much better research, so that their ideas are very different and stand out above the crowd. That's the thought leadership producer side Donald Thompson: Got it.

And primary research has a lot of different levers, right? When you describe primary research in your mind, what you're alluding to, what level of rigor is there? Like, how many people need to be in the survey? How much research needs to be done for where you would consider it credible as primary research?

Bob Buday: Yeah. It depends on the topic and how nascent the topic is. the research that I prefer is case study research.... now, one of the interesting ways that I think generative AI, and one of the most beneficial ways that I think generative AI tools are, can be and will be used in the future, is doing case study research Okay.

So I did this a couple months ago 'cause I, I'm - One of my other passions is the newspaper industry and keeping our newspaper industry alive in this country. Okay? And I asked ChatGPT, and I asked the same question to Gemini. I said, "Okay, I want to know why The New York Times' digital strategy has been so successful compared with the LA Times' digital strategy."

At - And back in the '80s when I'd lived in California, they were, they were competitors, LA Times and New York Times. In fact, I think the LA Times' revenue was higher than The New York Times back then So ChatGPT, tell me, drawing on what executives at these two organizations have said that you can find, ChatGPT, on the web in your extensive archive, tell me why one strategy was successful and the other not. And what came back to me in 30 minutes, 35 minutes, was astounding.

The, going back saying, the LA - the first wrong move of the LA Times was this. The New York Times, gave away their content for free on the web, and then they realized that's, not a smart strategy, and they put the paywall up," and all that. But an explosion of information and analysis that if I had done the desk research, it would've taken me weeks. Okay?

And now, because we know that these LLMs are susceptible to hallucinations, I have not checked all the facts. It could turn out 10% of the facts there and some of the analysis is wrong, so anybody using this is going to have to check the facts. But still, the legwork and, then of writing these two case studies. So my point is this: qualitative research for thought leadership purposes can now be scaled using LLMs, using generative AI.

You can scale this research. Now, that doesn't, kinda negate, remove the need to interview companies. Ideally, you s- would still, let's say you get, 100 case studies from generative AI. Why did these newspaper companies struggle with their digital operations, and why did these others succeed?

Okay, you got 100 on this side and probably fewer on this side, 50, let's say. I would still want to talk to people in companies at, at least 10% on both sides to supplement this, this generative AI. But, all to say, I think one of the biggest things that I see generative AI doing in the thought leadership world is scaling this kind of qualitative case study research Donald Thompson: I, really appreciate that and the depth of your explanation, and I can see that you think in case studies the way you give examples for what you're describing, right?

and, that is beautifully done. The thing that is pulling on me in a powerful way is the quality of writing that can be done is going to be more universal because the LLMs can be trained to do that. So we have to over-index on the quality of our new ideas and make sure that we're not regurgitating things that are out there. We really are bringing to market breakthrough thinking that then turns itself as a service enablement tool, that we can charge for.

And that needs to be a different bar that we measure versus something that just sounds good. In my notes, 'cause I, I just love learning, is sounding smart versus value creation are two different things, and we want to live in the value creation space, as, as thought leaders. Bob Buday: Yes. Everybody can sound smart today, and everybody can, right?

A, a, a 17-year-old who can write the right prompts on a very complex business i- issue can sound smart using generative AI, right? Who's never gone to business school, never done research on the topic. That person can sound pretty darn smart. and, this is a big problem for universities, is are, the students really writing their own papers, or are they totally outsourcing their thinking and their writing to these tools?

Donald Thompson: Yeah. No, that's a great piece. (Clip) Donald Thompson: If we think about the time we're in now, the other thing with AI and technology and the workforce is things are changing rapidly, and the pace of technology change is actually outpacing the pace at which humans can change. And so what we're finding is a natural barrier, to the speed of things.

And so when your production costs of a white paper of a new idea or a pitch deck or whatever go to zero, now all - And I'm being, overdramatic, but they, get very, low. Then the secret sauce is a new set of skills of how do you promote authenticity? How do you promote audience building, right? Because the cost of building the new thing is so low, and most people are used to a different time horizon on ideas coming to market (end clip) Bob Buday: I would say the cost of building a Hollywood stage set equivalent is so low.

The, the cost of building a very different idea based on rigorous research, that still takes money and that still takes time. Now maybe generative AI can quicken that time for sure, but, I don't think the next blockbuster idea is gonna be - come from someone like me, typing into ChatGPT and saying, "Give me a whole new idea about thought leadership that's about this and this." I don't see that working. And so yes, the pretenders can jump into our business faster than they ever could before because the time it takes to write and times it takes to gather a few facts and have something respectable is shrunken to minutes and, pennies.

So Donald Thompson: Here's, Bob, one thing that I, caution people in this AI paradigm. Eventually people are gonna interact with you in person, and if your thought leadership, your written communication doesn't align with how you can demonstrate that expecti- expertise real time, your credibility loss is instantaneous, Bob Buday: Yes. Donald Thompson: right? And so I do caution people to make sure that you're building content that represents your body of work, and the AI tools help you represent it better than trying to use the AI tools to represent a level of authority and insight that you do not really have with inside the business or people that can convey it.

Because people are becoming more and more savvy, of the people that are sounding smart and the people that are really delivering business value, right? The, the consumer expectation's getting higher Bob Buday: Absolutely. Maybe said another way, (clip) Bob Buday: it's easy to now to put a veneer of expertise, to have a veneer of expertise. But when you drill down a bit, a, a smart client asking a few really good questions will say, this is veneer.

these folks really don't know what they're talking about." so, yes, the end of the day, to me, the only lasting advantage, if it is lasting, in thought leadership is the ability to deliver the expertise that your research reports, your white papers, your conference presentations, your books, if you've written a book, the only competit- the only lasting advantage, and even that is not lasting forever till somebody comes up with a better method than you have for solving some problem in the world.

The lasting advantage is your company's ability to deliver that expertise at scale with high levels of quality (end clip) Donald Thompson: Beautifully said. That, that's gonna be a perfect soundbite as we promote this episode that - because what we're all looking for is how to develop competitive advantage and then how to create a moat around our competitive advantage. And what you talked about is that last mile, which is can you deliver on the insights that you are, positioning, right?

And that becomes the unlock, right? To make thought leadership live beyond the white paper, but in the P&L, right? Is can you deliver that expertise? So I love that.

I love that. I've done my homework on, before this, so I've done a lot of research on you and, just things. So here's another, another question, something that you wrote, that the big idea researcher is the most important role on a thought leadership team, and you compared it to a research scientist at a pharmaceutical company. So if a CEO is listening today and only has budget for one hire in their thought leadership role, and then they're gonna cobble it together with other team members, is that still the primary role that you would advocate?

Is that still a big a game-changer as you advocated in this article? Bob Buday: yes, because I think that role preferably is an internal role as opposed to an external entity, say a professor who a company partners with. you want that person, this, this thought leadership research chief, to be inside your business working just for you, not working with other competitors, okay? And therefore, an employee doing this is, the best possible situation.

the other roles can be backfilled, meaning you can go to the outside. You can find writing help. There are plenty of contractors. There's plenty of unemployed journalists, ver- some very good ones who, can do the writing work very well.

Other marketing people, social media marketers. You can outsource PR firms. You can outsource the rest. But if you don't have - And the reason I say that is the most important job, if you don't have big ideas coming out of your thought leadership research group, you can spend a lot on marketing and you're not gonna get a lot of traction.

You're not gonna le- get a lot of leads. and you're - at some point, top management is gonna say, what did we spend, on thought leadership? We spent a million dollars last year. What did we get?"

we got five inquiries that went nowhere. Now the fault there may lie somewhere else, but, companies need somebody or a group, preferably, who know how to do the research that leads to big ideas, game-changing ideas Donald Thompson: So I gotta land the plane. And, this has been a great conversation and, I'm not surprised, I'm just pleased. and I, love learning from people who have been that, been there and done that but still have just a hunger to learn themselves, and I, sense that in you.

What is the one thing about thought leadership, or two things, but what are, the things about thought leadership that you had to learn the hard way that nobody warned you about, and that nobody is really sounding the alarm for the next generation? So what, big advice would you give for someone like me that is building a career in this space, that's helping companies think about this, that, that you'd love to be helpful with? Bob Buday: one of the things is, how few people, and maybe it's changed today, even recognize thought leadership as a profession.

Okay? So I was asked to be a guest, speaker at a, a business - a, a graduate level communications course at a university in New York City, two years ago. And the, person who was teaching the course, said, "This is the only course I know of on thought leadership." The course was on thought leadership, okay?

As a not just a career opportunity, how you as a master's, level student, here's how to do thought leadership. So again, he said, "This is the only class..." I, and I guess he, he had checked, maybe gone on Google or, ChatGPT to say, "Where can I - what universities have courses on thought leadership?" His was the only one at the time.

So that to me was a sign of college students don't know about this profession. Okay? I know of people in this field on, on, on the editorial side of thought leadership who are making two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand dollars a year, maybe 10 years, into this. But there's a lot of opportunities in this profession of thought leadership, not just on the, the editorial and marketing side, but on the thought leadership research side.

So I wish somebody I - as I tell people, I just blundered into this profession in 1987, I - One of the analogies I use is I say, imagine like right out of college in the, in, in, the early '60s, someone, with, a, I don't know, marketing degree or something, somebody who said, "Hey, there's this band in Liverpool. they're called The Beatles. You probably haven't heard of them, but they need a publicist. would you, are you interested at all?"

And imagine turning that down. But I walked into this consulting firm in 1987. They want - they hired me to do their publications, okay? Thought leadership was not a term back then that anybody used.

We didn't even have a term for what we did. It was just, I'm gonna go straight and edit and, and help them get this publication out the door. So the field of thought leadership has just blossomed. So but yet, still, at the college level, few people know about the opportunities in this career.

Donald Thompson: That is fantastic. my final question for us as we land, and this is really an open one. I've asked a bunch and we've talked. What would you like to share with our audience that I haven't asked you?

As we put a bow around this conversation, what would you like to, wrap us up with, as we wind down this dialogue? Bob Buday: I, guess we touched on this, which is (clip) Bob Buday: will generative AI destroy jobs in thought leadership? Is this gonna be a good profession, for the foreseeable future? And, if a company can say, we used to have, five editors and two researchers in our thought leadership group, and now ChatGPT can spit out white papers and, collect secondary research and put out, we'll call it a research report, but it's really secondary research."

Do we need, do we need these seven people, No, get rid of them. All right. We'll just, we'll have - We'll bring one of them, and they're really there to use ChatGPT or the other tools to crank out our white papers. So the companies that do that, I think are gonna be very foolish because they're not gonna be coming up with material content that has, profound and profoundly new ideas.

So I think if anything, generative AI is going to help the thought leadership profession grow. (end clip) Bob Buday: And the, some of the keys to getting these thought leadership jobs are going to be things like, I predict, knowing how to do case study research through generative AI tools, getting really good at writing the prompts that lead to case studies, and of course, again, I'm not caution- I'm cautioning against just copying and pasting this stuff and putting it in your research report.

You have to check the facts, and you have to check the analysis. (clip) Bob Buday: I, see more companies saying, "We need to be thought leaders too," because more companies are looking, going to these generative AI tools to look for expertise. what's the best law firm to, to handle this legal issue? If your law firm hasn't written anything about the issue or not something that's very good, and five other law firms have written extensively about the issue, guess what?

Your law firm's not gonna - You're not gonna be there, right? and, where buyers are, looking for help. So I think, it's gonna lift the number of jobs for thought leadership professionals. (end clip) Bob Buday: But we all have to, even old dogs like me, we have to learn some new tricks Donald Thompson: Bob, this has been great.

your book is, right here with me, "Competing on Thought Leadership," and I've got it. The way I can tell is, I've got it earmarked. I've got, things coded with my pen. Like that, that's when I'm really into something versus just skimming for new insights.

How can people get in touch with you, engage with you if they want to use your advisory services and get to know you better? share with the audience how, they can connect with you Bob Buday: Sure. They can email me at BobBudayTLP, for Thought Leadership Partners, bob@BudayTLP.com.

Can visit the website, www.budaytlp.com, and, and they can watch my podcast, which is Everything Thought Leadership. and I'm, very active on LinkedIn Donald Thompson: Fan- fantastic.