Content is famously king, as the saying goes. But is that still the case? If AI is making content creation seemingly so straightforward, are we entering an age of ‘content for contents sake’?

In business terms, content creation is the process of producing material – whether written, visual, or otherwise – that sells and markets your business. Written content encapsulates, well, a lot, including:

• Educational content: blog posts, guides, and technical explainers that answer the questions you know your customers will be asking.
• Thought leadership: opinion pieces and analysis that position your team as worth listening to.
• Case studies: proof points, evidence that further demonstrates your expertise and acumen.
• Websites and landing pages: the words that do the selling.
• Sales enablement content: one-pagers, pitch decks.

A content writer does more than just write the content. They plan and strategize; but this means more than just filling a content calendar. The best content has purpose. Who is it for? What should it tell them? Why should they care? And what should they do?

It’s about intent as much as it’s about format. And there are five ways to write with intent in the AI era:

1. Understand your audience: Before putting pen to paper, a content writer needs to know who they’re writing for. What does the audience already know? What do they care about? What problems are they hoping to solve? What will grab their attention. Write for your reader, not for yourself (or your client).
2. Do the research: Good content requires substance. Which means getting to grips with the subject, interrogating the brief, finding credible sources and identifying interesting insights. Critically, it means asking questions that others might overlook. Killer research can separate genuinely useful and authoritative content from generic pieces that simply recycle what’s already out there.
3. Find the story: Any topic can be interesting with the right angle – even the most technical, complex, or seemingly mundane. The best content writers don’t just present information, they find the story and bring it to life. They identify where the information is interesting, particularly relevant, or surprising, and build a narrative around it. That could mean opening with an unexpected statistic, challenging a common assumption, or connecting a complex topic to an everyday experience.
4. Be clear and concise: Clarity beats cleverness. The best content writing makes complicated things feel simple, without oversimplifying them – using accessible language, structuring ideas logically, avoiding unnecessary jargon, and cutting anything that doesn’t contribute to the key message. That can mean becoming a ruthless editor: the first draft is rarely the best draft, and that’s fine; knowing what to remove is as important as knowing what to include.
5. Write with purpose: This is worth repeating. Because content should always be goal-orientated, whether that’s educating an audience, building trust, challenging perceptions, or encouraging action. Each piece of content must fit into a wider content strategy. And while impact is notoriously difficult to measure, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Did people read your publication? Did it resonate? Did it achieve its objectives? What can be improved next time?

Following these five steps can you ensure you avoid the trap of ‘content for contents sake’ and produce material that packs a punch, and supports your business goals:

Understand (know who you’re writing for) – Investigate (find the facts, insights, and substance) – Engage (give people a reason to care) – Simplify (make the complex accessible) – Deliver (create content that achieves something)

What does the future look like for content writing?

AI is making it easier than ever to produce competent, generic content. 7/10 content that ‘does the job’. But most businesses in 2026 want more than the bare minimum, they want to stand out. Originality is key so a content writer’s ability to bring fresh perspectives, unique thinking, and a distinctive voice is increasingly valuable.

AI should make us more productive, and that’s something that’s too often lost amidst the doom and gloom and inflated optimism. If AI can increasingly handle routine drafting, repurposing, and some research tasks, that should free up a content professional to focus more on generating genuine value. Writers will likely become strategists, editors, and even creative directors.

This creates demand for people who best embody the five points above – people who can devise what needs to be said, identify the right angle, evaluate accuracy, and turn information into something genuinely compelling. AI can’t do this, and we shouldn’t want it to. But it is shifting the writer’s role from producing every work to directing and improving the entire content creation process.

Originality is key so a content writer’s ability to bring fresh perspectives, unique thinking, and a distinctive voice is increasingly valuable. Almost half (49%) of the respondents to a Gartner survey in the US in June said that generative AI has made content quality worse. It’s even higher among gen Z and millennials (57%). And according to Orbit Media, blogging ‘performance’ is at a 12-year low despite huge AI adoption (92% of content marketers). Anecdotally, content professionals are spending as much time fixing AI-generated content as they are producing their own. With generic content becoming so easy to generate, original research, expert interviews, and distinctive opinions become more important.

Finally, search will continue to change how content is discovered, as AI-powered search is changing how people find and consume information. Users can obtain information without visiting the websites that supplied the information – a threat to traditional SEO-driven content strategies. Content writers will also need to consider how content gets discovered through AI assistants as well as traditional search engines.