The "AIrmani" Suit Effect: The Hidden Trap in Your Corporate Comms Process

Before AI, production friction imposed a natural filter. Research took days, drafting took weeks, and approval loops were slow. Rushing a half-baked thought yielded unreadable writing. The mess was obvious on the page, and corporations would never publish such slop.

Spending several thousand dollars and days to produce an article forced someone to ask a basic question: Is this point of view actually worth publishing? Teams had to slow down, rewind and fix the thinking before fixing the words.

The Broken Link That Almost No One Noticed

The problem is that AI has broken the content chain (Input > Process > Output) and most people don't even realise where the damage is.

Back when production friction enforced longer production timeframes, it also provided an implicit quality check. The time lag was the was often the breathing space needed to ensure the quality of a piece of content was up to par.

Today, generative AI has eliminated the production friction and with it, the built-in quality check. But it didn't leave a gap, it created a beautiful illusion. AI wraps weak logic in clean syntax and convincing formatting.

It's not that using AI in itself is bad. Applied in the right way, AI is a remarkable process accelerator and impact amplifier. The real issue is: what is it accelerating and amplifying?

The "AIrmani" Suit Effect

While AI has dropped the time for Process and Output to zero,it cannot create the quality Input. Generative AI has no original perspective, it simply accelerates whatever you give it. Feed it confusion and vague direction, and it generates noise at 10,000 words a minute.

A muddled brief comes out sounding like executive thought leadership, using the right tone and language. A poorly thought-out piece of corporate content gets dressed up in a sharp "AIrmani" suit in under sixty seconds.

But that AIrmani suit is starting to look a lot like the Emperor’s New Clothes, and audiences are beginning to see right through it. The growing backlash against AI slop shows that market tolerance for low-effort AI-generated content is eroding fast. And with reduced tolerance comes diminishing crediblity and stakeholder trust.

The Gap Is Also The Trap

Even seasoned professionals mistake polish for insight—I've caught myself doing it. The only thing that saves my own work is my decades of editorial habit that force me to slow down and edit out the AI slop.

I saw this clearly when I ran a workshop for comms professionals at a major government agency. Before anyone opened an AI tool, taught them my simple Content Clarity Framework.

I designed the 5 Questions in the Framework to sharpen focus. But when I asked the team to rework a social media post using the Framework, the output still didn't improve.

So I diagnosed the output with them.

When asked who the piece was specifically for, they listed every stakeholder who might conceivably care. When asked why the audience should care, they added three generic reasons for each group. Instead of narrowing down to one clear message, they piled on more and more objectives - accumulating more KPIs than a single post could carry. That's why the post remained muddled. Then I showed them how to really use the Framework.

Within 5 minutes, they could see how much sharper the message was becoming.

You see, they had a hidden presumption that the framework was going to improve the Process. They missed the entire point. The Content Clarity Framework doesn't help AI produce better output. It is designed to help humans give AI better Input, which then improves the AI content generation process as well as the Human-in-the-Loop quality monitoring process.

THAT is the correct chain that leads to quality AI output.

The workshop participants are not alone in the assumption that AI can take over the entire chain.

That's why people keep selling prompt templates promising to be a magic wand to generate great content with zero effort. That's wishing for a genie in a bottle. But it sells because there are plenty of people buying.

The only real training solution to ensure AI generated content is of high quality is to train the Human to be able to see strategically, think critically, and lead effectively. That will give them the skills to ensure they get the best out of AI.

If you want your content to stand out amidst the flood of AI-slop, stop outsourcing the whole pipeline to AI. Put your effort where value actually lives: at the Input stage.