Communications Pros Are Done With 'AI Voice'

Financial communications professionals say they can spot AI-generated content on sight, and the tell is not a single word. It is structural: near-identical paragraph lengths, confident-sounding contrasts that don't contrast anything, and a conclusion that restates the introduction without ever arriving anywhere.

"It's not that it's wrong," says Ashley Jones, Head of Financial Narrative. "It's just that it's not actually thinking."

Jones identifies the trap precisely. The shortcut tempts people to skip the thinking entirely, and the problem surfaces when someone pastes a transcript into a prompt and asks it what the story is. "The story is sometimes in the subtext: the context a person brings, the thing they noticed three months ago that this data finally confirms. A model doesn't have that context." Her test is direct: does this content belong to someone? "If yes, AI can help move it faster. But if the answer is no, or not yet, that's not an AI problem."

Michael Marinello, Global Head of Communications at J.P. Morgan Payments, describes AI as a tool that enhances a human-led process rather than replaces it. His team uses it to turn press releases into internal newsletter summaries, build synthetic personas to pressure-test messaging before it reaches real audiences, and optimize internal communications timing, an approach that produced a nearly 30% increase in global town hall attendance. "AI slop can be spotted easily," he says, "but if you're using the technology right, we shouldn't be able to notice the good actors."

Anna Kragie, Senior Director at The Fletcher Group, draws her line at competitive positioning and brand voice. Language that shapes how others talk about a brand is written, edited, and approved by people who understand the relationships and risks involved. 

Every piece of AI-generated content that gets published becomes training data for someone else's model. The brand voice outsourced to a default model is the brand voice shared with competitors. Kragie names the core risk plainly: AI has made it cheaper than ever to sound like everyone else. For financial brands whose differentiation is built on trust and expertise accumulated over years, that is not a minor stylistic problem.