Tyler Suomala is the Founder of Growthitect, where he assists architecture company owners increase charges, develop constant lead flows, and win high-quality customers.
Everyone has the very same tools now. AI can compose your task descriptions. It can draft your blog posts. It can generate social captions, email series, website copy and thought management articles before your morning coffee gets cold.
And so the temptation is obvious. If it used to take you 4 hours to write a single LinkedIn post, and now you can publish 30 in the same time, why wouldn’t you? Volume wins, right? Not precisely.
Volume isn’t naturally bad. If your firm has actually been posting once a month (or worse, as soon as a quarter), then yes, more content is going to help. Going from near-invisible to consistently present makes a genuine distinction. Nobody’s arguing that. However there’s a tipping point, and most companies blow right past it without discovering.
That tipping point is when volume starts changing quality instead of enhancing it. When the bar for “good enough” drops since publishing is easier. When you stop asking “Does this seem like us?” and start asking “Is this enough to post?”
That shift is subtle. You will not see it in any single post. But over weeks and months, you start losing the thing that made a potential client stop scrolling and think, “I wish to deal with these individuals.” Your voice. Your perspective. The character behind the work. And once that’s gone, it’s truly difficult to get back.
AI Produces the Perfect Average
Black Ocean Firehouse by Rafael de Cárdenas/ Architecture at Big, New York City City, New York City Here’s what happens when you hand your marketing over to AI: By style, AI creates the best possible average of whatever it knows. The very best average.
That indicates if you prompt it to compose a task description, you get one that sounds like every other project description it’s ever been trained on. Sleek, competent, and completely forgettable. If you’re utilizing AI the very same way everybody else is (exact same triggers, same workflows, very same “compose me a LinkedIn post about sustainable style”), then your material is going to converge with everybody else’s.
When 90% of firms are utilizing AI the same method, the output looks, sounds and feels the same. You think you’re separating when you’re really converging.
Architecture already has problem with distinction. Many company sites could switch logos, and you ‘d never ever know the distinction. The “About” pages all read the very same, and task descriptions examine the same boxes. The same chooses social posts. And that was before AI went into the picture. Now take that existing sameness and add a tool that, by its very nature, presses whatever towards the center. You can see where this is heading …
When customers can’t tell companies apart, they default to the only differentiator left: rate. That’s commoditization. That’s the race to the bottom that every designer says they wish to avoid, however few are actively doing anything to avoid. And the irony is that the tool numerous firms are embracing to “improve” their marketing is the really thing making it harder to stand out.
AI isn’t causing this on its own, however it is accelerating it. And the majority of companies don’t even realize it’s taking place because the content looks great. It checks out fine. It’s grammatically right and professionally polished. However “professionally polished” and “definitely yours” are two extremely different things.
Much better Is Much better
Black Ocean Firehouse by Rafael de Cárdenas/ Architecture at Large, New York City City, New York City
So how do you use AI without losing yourself while doing so? You flip the sequence.
A lot of companies are doing it in reverse. They begin with AI and hope the output suffices. They let the tool specify the voice, the tone, the message. Then they fine-tune a few words and hit publish. And they do this over and over, week after week, until one day they look at their website and their socials and their proposals and recognize none of it sounds like them any longer. Everything seem like AI. Which implies it all seem like everyone.
The companies that will in fact stick out are doing the reverse. They specify what “much better” appears like for themselves first, and after that they make that version of much better repeatable with AI. The difference and order of occasions make a substantial distinction.
If you start with AI and work backwards, you end up at the mean. You wind up in the middle of the pack. You end up sounding like every other firm that took the faster way. But if you start with yourself (your real voice, your actual perspective, the way you really talk with customers when you’re at your finest) and then utilize AI to scale that? Now you have actually got something worth scaling.
Before you ever open ChatGPT or Claude or whatever tool you’re utilizing, you need to get clear on a couple of things. What does your firm really sound like? What you seem like in a pitch, in a customer conference, in a discussion with a coworker you trust. What’s your viewpoint on architecture, on how structures should serve individuals, on what makes a task worth doing? And where are the boundaries? Where does AI help, and where does it need to stop?
If AI can’t pull those answers from your prompt or its memory, it’s going to complete the blanks with the average. And you won’t even notice it happening up until it’s currently happened.
As soon as those things are specified (actually specified, not simply slightly comprehended), AI ends up being an amplifier rather of a replacement. It takes your voice and makes it more consistent, more scalable, more effective. However the voice is still yours. That’s the whole point; without that structure, you’re simply generating content.
You need to know who you are and what you believe before you AI or automate anything. Your experience. Your perspective. Your taste. Your conviction about what good architecture actually implies. Those things have to come from you. They need to be specified by you. And they have to be safeguarded by you, particularly as the tools get more powerful and the temptation to turn over the secrets gets more powerful.
More content isn’t the response; better content is. And much better starts with you, not with a prompt.
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