If commodity content is essentially information without experience, then the obvious question becomes how businesses move beyond it. This is where, in my experience, many content strategies begin to diverge quite significantly. One approach continues to treat content as a production exercise. Topics are selected, briefs are written and articles move through a process until they are published. The other approach begins with the assumption that the most valuable material already exists somewhere inside the organisation itself. The challenge is not generating content from nothing, but extracting expertise from the people who possess it.
This is often where I find conversations with clients become particularly interesting. The specialists within a business frequently assume that the things they know are obvious. They have spent years solving the same types of problems, answering similar questions and helping clients navigate familiar situations. What feels routine to them is often highly valuable to somebody encountering the subject for the first time. The difficulty is that expertise tends to exist as conversation rather than documentation. It appears in meetings, workshops, client calls and discussions between colleagues rather than neatly organised articles waiting to be published.
The tools now available to us have made this process considerably easier. We can begin by understanding what search engines already know about a subject, what competitors are discussing and which questions repeatedly appear around a particular topic. That gives us the baseline. We can see the established knowledge, the areas of demand and the subjects that readers are actively trying to understand. In many respects, this is the part of the process that AI handles exceptionally well. Large language models are extremely capable at summarising information, identifying themes and helping us organise a body of knowledge that already exists.
The point at which human expertise becomes critical is when we move beyond what is already known. Once we understand the standard explanations, the commonly discussed approaches and the prevailing advice, the conversation changes. We can begin asking the people inside the business what they actually think. Why do they approach a problem differently? What mistakes do they repeatedly encounter? Which assumptions do they disagree with? What has changed in their industry over the past few years? Which decisions do clients struggle with most often? The answers to these questions rarely exist within keyword tools or competitor analysis.
Much of our process therefore begins to resemble an interview rather than a content briefing. We may arrive with a structure, a set of topics and an understanding of what the search landscape looks like, but the most valuable material often emerges through discussion. Recorded conversations, workshops and stakeholder interviews allow expertise to surface in a form that can then be organised, edited and incorporated into the final content. The objective is not to transcribe what somebody says verbatim, but to capture their perspective accurately enough that the finished article genuinely reflects how they think.
One of the reasons I find this approach increasingly important is that it creates content that could not easily be generated elsewhere. A competitor may target the same topic. An AI system may explain the same concept. Another business may answer similar questions. What they cannot reproduce particularly easily is the accumulated experience of a specific organisation, working with specific clients, within a particular market. That perspective becomes part of the content itself, which is precisely what makes it valuable.
The same principle increasingly extends beyond written articles. Video, audio, interviews, demonstrations and interactive elements all allow businesses to communicate expertise in ways that are much harder to commoditise. As AI systems become increasingly capable of generating text, these additional forms of communication may become even more important. They allow readers to hear directly from the specialists involved, observe how they explain concepts and understand the people behind the business itself.
This is one of the reasons our conversations around content often overlap with design and development. The objective is no longer simply publishing information onto a page. It is creating environments in which expertise can be experienced. Strong design encourages engagement, thoughtful interaction and easier understanding. Flexible development allows content to take different forms and evolve over time. The written article remains important, but increasingly it becomes one component within a broader system that helps businesses communicate what they know.
The irony, perhaps, is that the growth of AI may make human expertise more visible rather than less. If systems become increasingly effective at reproducing general knowledge, then the organisations that can clearly articulate their own experience, perspective and judgement may find themselves standing out more distinctly than before. The challenge is not competing against the machine. It is contributing something the machine does not already know.
