A.I. changes everything; But B2B journalism doesn't want to change

I seem to find myself in a strange time loop.

A few decades ago, as the Web altered the nature of communications, it was painful to watch how B2B journalism failed to adapt. A stubborn resistance to change among older journalists permeated the industry.

Now the world is changing once more, and B2B journalism is not adapting.

This time the force driving change is the emergence of artificial intelligence in content creation. And just like in the days of the early Web, I find myself in painful conversations with B2B journalists who insist they don't need to learn anything new because the old ways are best.

I complained about this a few weeks ago on social media. Paul Heney, founder of Trade, Association and Business Publications International (TABPI), asked me to elaborate. So I did. If you're interested you can read the essay I wrote.

So here's the thing. That essay is only a week old and it's already feeling dated. A.I. The changes wrought by A.I. are accelerating. The costs of ignoring it are accelerating too.

Until recently it was possible for business journalists to ignore A.I.'s implications. Grammarly is pretty cool. But it never threatened anyone's job.

But ChatGPT-4, which debuted roughly 48 hours before I started writing this post, cannot be ignored. It is simply too smart, too powerful, and too good at doing much of what humans do for a living. Just a week ago I would tell journalists they had a year or so to prepare. I no longer believe this. In that essay for TABPI, I noted that content marketers have embraced A.I. tools and I implied that was enough. I no longer believe that either.

People will lose their jobs. Quickly. Companies will fall. Soon.

I have some thoughts on what things will look like when the dust settles. There are, I believe, a handful of approaches to B2B content and news that will succeed in a world dominated by artificial intelligence. In the next few weeks, I'll write about them here on this blog and share them at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulconley/.

And let's hope that whatever it is I write doesn't become dated just seconds after publication when some new iteration of chatbot appears.