Before you pick up the phone, they're already reading your feed. That's not a generalization. That's how decisions are made now. LinkedIn is where that impression lives, and for most CEOs, it's managed more like an obligation than a revenue-generating asset.
In the nearly 25 years I've spent in communications and working with executives, that question has never changed.Help us with LinkedIn” What has changed is the reality on the other side of that question. Communications teams used to operate with a broad outline and create content that at least resembled the executives it represented. Today, with AI doing much of the generation, the gap between feeds that look like you and feeds that just look like you has never been more pronounced and costly.
According to a study cited in Entrepreneur, personal profiles generate five times more engagement than company pages, and organic posts on company pages currently only make up 1-2% of the posts that appear in a typical LinkedIn feed. LinkedIn does not reward logos. Having a trusted and active presence on the platform is rewarding for people. The most valuable person in your organization is you.
The problem isn't AI. That's what we handed over with it.
Most CEOs have invested in their teams, their strategy, and perhaps their communication infrastructure, including AI tools. But investing in communication is not the same as valuing it. That distinction is why most executives' LinkedIn strategies quietly fail.
Here's what I've observed happening in different organizations. The CEO wants help with LinkedIn. The communications person says, of course. And then the CEO disappears again to run the company, and the communicators end up producing content without a single thing worth reading. That is, what management actually thinks. Before AI, that gap created actionable content. Today, content is being created that is sophisticated, plausible, and indistinguishable from other content. This is because the content is generated in the same way from prompts rather than humans.
What is lost is not abstract credibility, but the concrete texture of your decisions, including the friction points and counterintuitive lessons learned from being in rooms where those decisions have real consequences. It's material that viewers can't get anywhere else, and when AI generates rather than sharpens your perspective, that material disappears. All that's left is professional-looking, nonsensical content that the people you want to reach the most will notice before you do.
Explain it to your communications people the same way you would explain it to your sales team
This fix is not a new tool or a different strategy. It's a relationship, and it takes less time than most executives assume. Meet and talk with your communicators, not just to check your content calendar. Tell them what makes you feel good. Tell them about a conversation you had with a customer that reframed a problem you thought you had solved, a change in your industry that you've been paying attention to, or a decision you made last quarter that you're still reconsidering. That raw material is what separates a LinkedIn presence that creates real interest from one that creates noise.
Think about how you prepare your sales team. You tell them your strongest case, your clearest evidence, and your views on the market and competition. A LinkedIn presence does the same job and deserves the same investment. It's early in the process, before anyone is answering the phone, and the prospect is still deciding whether or not it's worth your time.
Before the next post is published under your name, ask yourself one question. Is there anything in that post that could only have come from you? If the answer is no, it's not ready yet. Not because the writing isn't good enough, but because the idea behind it isn't yours, and the people you're trying to reach will feel it, even if they can't name them.
That's not a high bar for using AI. There is a higher bar to having the right to bear your name and actually do work for your business.
