By Byron V. Acohido
Is agentic AI accelerating mediocrity? Loads of people on LinkedIn appear to assume so.
Associated: The four-hundredth journalist
A rising refrain of lecturers, tech employees, and digital tradition watchers are stating the apparent: the extra we immediate, the extra we flatten. Throughout advertising and marketing, B2B, and even journalism, GenAI is churning out clear, inoffensive, structurally sound content material that claims virtually nothing. It’s the regression to the imply, algorithmically engineered.
However that’s solely half the story. The opposite half is unfolding extra quietly—and it’s way more disruptive.
Whereas a lot of the world defaults to prompt-fed sameness, one thing extra radical is occurring beneath the floor. Agentic AI is decreasing the barrier to entry for severe analysis. It’s serving to small voices craft huge concepts. It’s giving the under-resourced instruments to compete with the over-credentialed.
This isn’t nearly sparking creativity—it’s about enabling company. Throughout lecture rooms, basements, retirement houses, and refugee camps, individuals who have been by no means invited to the desk are starting to construct their very own.
Personalization seduction
In the meantime, the skilled class is drowning in a special sort of transformation—one which guarantees personalization, however delivers uniformity.
Within the rush to embrace GenAI, corporations throughout industries have flooded the zone with AI-shaped content material—inner decks, outreach emails, whitepapers—hoping for differentiation by way of automation.
GenAI was speculated to be a leap ahead—a method to personalize intelligence, speed up perception, and elevate the typical skilled. However an odd factor is occurring: the extra individuals immediate these fashions, the extra the outcomes blur into sameness.
Stephen Klein, CEO of Curiouser.AI, not too long ago captured this paradox in a viral LinkedIn submit: “The extra you immediate, the extra you regress to the imply.” His level? That prompting appears like personalization, however really results in mass-produced output. As an alternative of sharpening our edge, we could also be sanding it down—unaware we’re doing it.
But that’s simply the floor layer. What’s extra revealing is what occurs when somebody tries to interrupt the sample—once they use agentic AI to form a well-structured, unique perception. It usually will get rejected. Not as a result of it’s fallacious, however as a result of it sounds too clear. Too assured. Too totally different from the muddled content material we’ve come to count on.
To be clear, the regression I’m referring to right here isn’t just the legacy blandness of promoting collateral, however a brand new, extra insidious sameness pushed by over-reliance on GenAI prompting. We’ve moved from predictable company boilerplate to mass-produced GenAI content material that flattens tone, language, and concepts into indistinguishable output. And mockingly, when one thing manages to interrupt that sample—to face out with actual perception and narrative readability—it’s usually rejected exactly as a result of it’s mistaken for the GenAI-generated fluff it was designed to transcend.
Regression to the imply
This regression exhibits up in every single place. I see it in B2B thought management drafts handed off by PR groups which might be clearly engineered by way of Search engine marketing-fed immediate templates. Everybody’s content material begins sounding the identical: “next-gen, data-driven, transformation-ready.”
I see it on LinkedIn, the place posts claiming to supply daring takes on digital transformation all carry the identical flattened cadence, polished to the purpose of meaninglessness.
And I see it in emails—generally with the precise ChatGPT icon bullets nonetheless embedded within the pitch. A lifeless giveaway that somebody copied and pasted straight from the immediate window with out even bothering to disguise it. It’s not simply lazy; it indicators an absence of possession over the message. The mannequin could be highly effective, however the considering is paper-thin.
This distinction reveals one thing else fully: a rising divide between these regressing to the GenAI imply—and people quietly escaping it. Let’s name it “Editorial Ascent.” It’s the inverse of regression. It’s what occurs when agentic AI is mixed with seasoned editorial instinct to provide readability, originality, and decision-grade perception.
This rising divide issues. Whereas a lot of B2B continues to flatten into GenAI monotony, a smaller set of organizations is quietly charting a special course—utilizing AI to not change judgment, however to reinforce it.
Listed below are three real-world examples of Editorial Ascent in movement:
Cybersecurity adoption
At RSAC 2025, a number of corporations modeled this hybrid strategy to sturdy impact:
Corelight showcased its Investigator SaaS NDR platform, designed to automate alert triage and risk searching throughout complicated environments. What made their strategy stand out wasn’t simply the GenAI tooling—it was the guardrails. Corelight engineers constructed the platform with deep SOC analyst enter, making certain that automation amplified, quite than overrode, professional workflows.
Simbian demonstrated an agentic platform that embeds retrieval-augmented technology (RAG) into day by day SOC workflows. Reasonably than giving analysts a chatbot, Simbian constructed AI brokers that sit invisibly inside risk triage, vulnerability administration, and searching operations—doing the work of decoding alerts and suggesting actions with out demanding a brand new interface. The human stays in management, however the machine clears cognitive fog.
That flexibility mindset was echoed by Anetac CEO Tim Eades: native GenAI corporations have a structural benefit as a result of they’re architected for flexibility from the beginning. In distinction, legacy safety distributors usually battle to retrofit brittle product stacks not designed for the fluid, iterative calls for of agentic AI. As Eades put it, success now will depend on the flexibility to adapt—not simply automate.
This emphasis on adaptability extends past safety. Salesforce, the CRM big, has adopted GenAI internally to not change its gross sales and advertising and marketing groups, however to assist them. Their AI copilots assist craft customized e mail outreach, suggest next-best actions, and analyze buyer indicators — however each step is structured for human evaluate. Reasonably than chasing full automation, Salesforce constructed its GenAI stack to reinforce the choice cadence of skilled reps — a textbook case of agentic augmentation in motion.
What we’re witnessing is a bifurcation. On one aspect, AI regression—the flattening of communication, the substitute of depth with prompt-fed output, the consolation of sounding like everybody else. On the opposite, Editorial Ascent—the hassle to wield AI not as a ghostwriter, however as a collaborator, amplifying judgment with out sacrificing nuance.
The examples from RSAC 2025—and from corporations like Salesforce—aren’t simply product tales. They’re indicators {that a} new mode of communication is rising. One the place credibility isn’t manufactured by templates, however solid by way of readability, context, and synthesis.
Ascent supercedes regression
That is the way forward for belief in B2B: not GenAI on the helm, however skilled minds guiding AI towards significant, differentiated output. Those that embrace this hybrid mannequin—those that spend money on editorial ascent—gained’t simply stand out. They’ll set the agenda.
And this divide gained’t cease at B2B. We’re already starting to see the identical editorial rigidity spill into journalism, policymaking, and public discourse—the place AI could form the message, however belief nonetheless hinges on who frames it.
As a result of sure, Klein is true: prompting alone regresses to the imply. However the true hazard isn’t simply homogenization. It’s a failure to acknowledge the sign when it breaks by way of.
When one thing is dismissed as “too AI” just because it’s well-crafted, it tells us all the pieces we have to know: the fashions could run on chance—however authority nonetheless belongs to human judgment.
That’s why the true GenAI story isn’t nearly regression to the imply—it’s about divergence at scale. On one finish, you’ve obtained legacy establishments chasing effectivity, flattening their very own voice within the course of. On the opposite, a quiet rebellion: people utilizing these identical instruments to create that means, forge identification, and punch above their weight.
I see it firsthand. I’m co-writing a novel with my 7-year-old grandson, Kekoa Kalani Acohido. He desires the scenes; I information the arc. The AI helps us form the hearth into kind. That e book, The Chronicles of Lumenox, isn’t only a story—it’s a small act of editorial ascent. A reminder that when entry meets creativeness, even the youngest amongst us can pierce the algorithmic haze with one thing unmistakably human.
Pulitzer Prize-winning enterprise journalist Byron V. Acohido is devoted to fostering public consciousness about how you can make the Web as non-public and safe because it should be.
(Editor’s observe: A machine assisted in creating this content material. I used ChatGPT-4o to speed up analysis, to scale correlations, to distill complicated observations and to tighten construction, grammar, and syntax. The evaluation and conclusions are fully my very own—drawn from lived expertise and editorial judgment honed over many years of investigative reporting.)
