We may not be moving away from brand voice. We may be moving away from the idea that a brand should sound like one person.

By Sarah Williams, Founder of Leading Culture | Business Growth Strategist

Historically, brand voice was useful because it created consistency. Everyone writing for the business was given the same vocabulary, tone, sentence structure, level of formality and so on. But generative AI can now reproduce that kind of consistency extraordinarily well.

Ironically, the things we used to regard as evidence of a “strong brand voice” can now become signals of synthetic content: polished, consistent, grammatically perfect, predictable.

So perhaps the role of brand voice is changing.

Instead of saying, “This is how everyone at Leading Culture should sound,” the brand might define the beliefs, worldview, and boundaries, while the individual provides the voice.

That would mean Sarah sounds like Sarah. Iain sounds like Iain. Someone else writing from Leading Culture sounds like themselves. They don't need to use the same turns of phrase or even the same writing style. What makes the content recognisably Leading Culture isn't linguistic sameness. It's the ideas underneath it: the way you think about people and profit, your willingness to challenge conventional thinking, curiosity, practical commerciality, your belief in possibility, and so forth.

And AI makes that distinction more important, not less.

There's also a lovely paradox in what you've just dictated:

For years we've been polishing the humanity out of business communication in the name of professionalism and brand consistency. Now AI can produce polished corporate prose almost instantaneously; the scarce thing becomes the stuff that can't easily be manufactured:

• lived experience

• peculiar observations

• strong opinions

• unfinished thoughts

• humour

• stories

• contradictions

• personal vocabulary

• individual perspective

I wouldn't throw away brand voice. I'd probably evolve it into something closer to a brand worldview + human voices model.

I wonder if you're doing the same.