Let's talk about AI

Quick question: how does your team find a specific product screenshot? Or brand asset? Or campaign visual? I bet the answer involves Slack / Teams / “Just asking around”. Somebody pings the person who probably uploaded it, that person digs through a folder, and 20 minutes later you’ve got a file called hero-final-FINAL-v3.png that may or may not be the right one. And look – we already solved this problem for documents.

Something happened in the last twelve months and I don’t think we have the right words for it yet. Everyone keeps saying “AI is changing work.” It’s on every keynote slide. Every LinkedIn carousel. And what they mean is: AI does the task faster. OK, sure. We get it. But that’s not what’s actually going on. Not for the people I talk to who are building companies right now, anyway.

I’m going to be honest with you. I’m still figuring this out. Not in a “nobody knows anything” way. In a “the ground is shifting under our feet and the teams that figure it out first will have a massive advantage” way. I’ve been building content management tools for B2B teams for years, and what I’m seeing right now is the biggest shift since we moved from printed collateral to digital.

Here’s a fun exercise. Go look at the filenames in your Google Drive or SharePoint right now. I’ll wait. How many of them look like Q4-Deck-FINAL-v3-Dave-edits-REAL-FINAL.pptx or resources_customerStory_sonos_brandUpdate_jan23_letter_webReady.pdf? That’s the state of most content libraries. And it’s not because people are lazy. It’s because naming files well is boring, repetitive work that nobody gets credit for. So it doesn’t get done. And then six months later, a rep searches for “Sonos case study” and finds nothing because the file is called a string of underscores and dates.

Every sales enablement tool now claims AI features. Every vendor’s website has an AI section with glowing promises about “intelligent content recommendations” and “AI powered insights.” Half of it is real. Half of it is the 2024 version of “we have machine learning”, which was the 2019 version of “we have big data.” Here’s my honest take on what’s actually delivering value, what requires way more investment than vendors admit, and how to evaluate AI features without getting sold a demo that doesn’t match production reality.

I review a lot of sales content. For our customers, for prospects evaluating Content Camel, for competitive research. And over the last year, something shifted: I started being able to tell which assets were AI generated within the first paragraph. Not because I’m some detection genius. Because they all sound the same. Open any LinkedIn feed and count how many posts start with “In today’s rapidly evolving landscape…” or “Here are 7 ways to…” or “The key to success is…” That’s not content strategy.

Here’s a frustrating reality of sales content management: the content exists, but nobody can find it. Marketing spent weeks creating a great healthcare case study. It’s in the drive. It has metrics. It tells a compelling story. And when a rep on a call with a healthcare prospect needs it, they search “healthcare case study” and get nothing; because the file is named CS_Acme_Health_Q3_Draft_Final.pdf and it’s three folders deep in a subdirectory organized by the person who left the company two years ago.

I bet you already know which assets your sales team reaches for. It’s the same 3-5 “safe” picks – the main deck, that one case study, maybe a product one-pager. Regardless of the deal, the stage, or the buyer. And it’s not because those are the best assets. It’s because your reps can’t find anything else. If you’re already a Content Camel customer, you know our keyword search is fast. Instant results, powered by search with AI.

Here’s the problem with most homepage messaging You spent weeks getting your homepage redesign shipped. The design is clean, the layout is sharp, the team signed off on the copy. But here’s what nobody tells you: the headlines you wrote are probably focused on you, not your buyer. And that’s exactly why visitors are bouncing. Most homepage headlines fall into the same trap. They describe what the product does. They list features.