698 - Why AI Cannot Write a CEO’s Point of View
In this Daily Hint, Jens Heitland explains why a CEO’s point of view has to come from the CEO and cannot be produced by AI alone. Drawing on six to twelve hours of in-depth interviews and story capture to understand each executive, he explains that the real value lies in a leader's connections to their industry, which only surface through long conversations and careful listening.
AI can support the process once that groundwork exists, although it still needs to be pushed and trained before it recognizes those connections. Jens also shares a simple measure of authenticity: when people who know a CEO in person read their content and feel it does not sound like them, the content has lost its originality.
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Why a CEO’s Point of View Cannot Be Generated
Executive communication has moved online at a remarkable pace. Boards, investors, employees, and future hires now form part of their impression of a leader through what that leader publishes. At the same time, AI tools can produce polished content in minutes. Together, they've created an environment where executive content keeps rising in volume, while its distinctiveness is becoming harder to find.
In my experience, the problem rarely sits in the writing itself. A well-structured post with sound arguments can still feel empty to the people who know the author. Colleagues read it and sense a distance between the person they work with and the voice on the screen. Former teams notice phrasing the leader would never use. Industry peers recognize ideas that could belong to anyone.
A leader's point of view is shaped by the connections they've built with their industry over many years. Those connections include the decisions they made under pressure, the people who influenced them, the markets they watched change, and the convictions they formed along the way. They are rarely written down anywhere. They live in stories, in offhand remarks and in the way a leader explains why something matters to them. In our work with CEOs, uncovering them typically takes six, and sometimes twelve, hours of in-depth interviews and story capturing. We need that time because meaningful links between a person and their field tend to emerge slowly, often in the second or third conversation, after the obvious answers have already been given.
AI has a real role once that groundwork exists. It can organize material, test formulations, and speed up production considerably. On its own, it can't identify which connection makes one leader’s perspective different from another’s. It has to be pushed, guided and trained with the substance gathered in those conversations before it begins to see the pattern. Without that input, the tool returns the most likely version of an idea, which is usually also the most common one.
When content drifts away from the person, the consequences build quietly. The people who know the CEO in person begin to read the content as a role being played. Some of them say it openly to the leader. Others quietly stop engaging with what is published. The gap between the leader people meet and the leader people read gradually becomes a credibility question, and executive content is meant to support credibility in the first place. The effect rarely shows up in engagement figures, because the readers who notice are often the ones whose trust matters most.
It also affects the leader. When published content does not reflect how they actually think, they become less comfortable standing behind it in conversations, on stage or in interviews. With each piece, the online voice and the offline voice drift further apart, and the effort required to bring them back together keeps growing.
Authenticity in executive communication depends on origin. The thinking must start with the leader, and every step that follows, including the use of AI, must protect what makes that thinking original. A reliable test is simple. When someone who has worked alongside the CEO reads a piece and immediately recognizes the person, the content is doing its job. When they hesitate, something in the process has moved too far from its source.
Highlights:
00:00 CEO Point of View
00:36 AI as Support Tool
00:49 Authenticity and Originality
01:13 Closing Thoughts
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Transcript :
When it comes to the point of view that we help our clients, the CEOs that we work with, to formulate is truly it needs to be truly their point of view. There is no AI that can help with that. Because one of the things that, that we understand is through, I don't know, six, sometimes even 12 hours of deep interviews and deep story capturing, is understanding the different connections of that person to that industry and making this connection. Obviously, if you have done all the homework, you can do that with AI, and AI should support you. But you still need to push AI and train it so that it sees that connection. And I think for me it's super, super important that the originality of the CEO needs to come through. If you create content as a CEO and people that know you in person say, "This is not you. You're kind of playing a role," or, "I have never seen this from you," there's something wrong. It need to be 100% authentic and hundred 100% original.