Outsourced thought leadership isn't thought. Or leadership.
The polished leadership post in your feed, the one about how titles don't make you a leader, was probably written by someone in the Philippines making $7 an hour. The executives applauding underneath aren't real either.
That's the reporting in this Rest of World piece. The outlet spoke to six virtual assistants who write posts and comments on behalf of Western executives. One generates 30 to 40 comments a day off a four-page memo about her client's favorite books, all run through ChatGPT. They organize in WhatsApp groups, tipping each other off to go and like and comment on each other's clients so the engagement looks organic. The volume produces the occasional tell: one assistant posted "Huge win" under a 9/11 memorial. The line that stuck with me was an assistant's own description of the work: it's all AI comments by fake people answered with fake replies by other fake people.
Jenni and I opened Episode 60 on this, and the thing she landed on first wasn't the outsourcing. It was the why. Most of those posts are visibly AI-generated anyway. The problem is the reason behind them: writing for the attention, the clicks, the little pat on the back, rather than to be useful to anyone reading. She'd had breakfast with an in-house head of internal comms the day before who told her she can't bear LinkedIn anymore, because it's wall-to-wall with this.
The part that should worry communicators is the slippery slope. If a leader is comfortable outsourcing their external thought leadership, the jump to outsourcing internal leadership comms is a short one, and a much easier sell. We spend a lot of energy asking leaders to be authentic. This is the authenticity. When a leader hands their voice to someone they'll never meet, that decision is the authentic act, and it's telling us exactly how much they value being in the conversation.
Which raises the question underneath all of it: what does the leader actually gain?
If they won't invest the time, they aren't reading the responses, aren't in the dialogue, aren't getting the one thing social was meant to give them. They've bought the appearance of presence and skipped the presence. Jenni's own reason for never outsourcing it is sharper than any principle: if someone came up to her and quoted her own post back to her, "leadership isn't about titles, it's about kindness," and she had no idea what they were talking about, she'd want the ground to open up. You can't get caught out by words you actually wrote.
A line from the Gallagher Summit that Jenni brought back frames the cost cleary:
Trust travels socially, not structurally
Trust moves through people, not org charts. So when the social signal itself is manufactured, the fake comments, the borrowed voice, the rented enthusiasm, the trust doesn't travel at all. It just looks like it did. The tools that make this cheap aren't going away, and the incentives reward it. The only thing standing between a leader and a fully outsourced voice is a decision that their own words are worth their own time. Most "thought leadership" programs skip that part, which is why so little of it is either.
Also in this episode: We turned to a University of Maryland study that analyzed 61,000 human and AI stories and identified AI writing with 93% accuracy, with the tell being structure, not vocabulary. Strip out the em dashes and the clichés and you can still spot it, because AI over-explains, resolves conflict cleanly and ties everything in a bow, while humans leave gaps and trust the audience to connect the dots. I pushed back on treating those AI habits as purely negative: sometimes the audience can't connect the dots, and the over-explained version communicates better. Jenni's counter was the one that holds for our work, though. Too-neat triggers the same skepticism employees already bring to internal comms, and a story with no gaps gives the imagination nothing to do.
Then the workforce itself. The Independent reported that one in four US workers is now over 55, up more than 17% in a decade, with farming, school bus driving and transit running well above that. The distinction that changes everything for managers and communicators is whether people are staying because they want to work or because they can't afford to stop. That question reshapes employee experience, what belongs in an engagement survey (Jenni's point: do we ever actually ask people why they work here?), and whether comms strategies built around the youngest generation are missing the larger, older share of the workforce. Underneath it sits an eroded deal: the employer who once took care of you at retirement mostly doesn't anymore, so people keep working partly because they no longer feel safe.
The BBC covered Beth Littlewood, the canoe polo champion and personal trainer who drove 800 miles through the night from the European Championships after her manager revoked her leave mid-competition and ordered her back for a meeting. The manager didn't show. He was away on training. Beth represented herself at tribunal, relying on meticulous records, and won about £149,000. The judge called the no-show contemptuous and blamed poor communication for the whole mess. But as we said on the show, this isn't really a communication story, it's a management and culture story, and the uncomfortable takeaway is that documentation was the only protection Beth had. When the safest thing an employee can do is keep a paper trail, the system has already failed them. You can hear more of Jenni's thinking on leadership credibility and internal communication at thejennifield.com.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.
The Frequency Podcast
Real talk about comms, culture, and employee experience.
Chuck Gose and Jenni Field skip the buzzwords and get straight to what matters. New episodes every week.
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