If you have been waiting for someone to confirm that the next 12 months of B2B content will be a slow-motion car crash followed by a tentative swerve toward sanity, Livia Hirsch is here to oblige. A B2B content strategist who specializes in helping scale-ups expand into the US market, Hirsch sat down with Sophie Steffen to deliver what amounts to a forecast, a warning, and a career survival guide all at once. The forecast is not cheerful. The warning is not subtle. The career advice, however, is genuinely useful, which makes it something of an anomaly in this industry.
The 12-Month Forecast: More Slop, Then a Correction
Let us begin with the bad news, since that is where reality insists on starting. Hirsch’s short-term prediction is that AI-generated content will keep rising, that more companies will default to the “I can just quickly do this with AI” school of blog production, and that the volume of mediocre material clogging the internet will increase accordingly. This is not so much a forecast as a description of what is already happening, delivered with the weariness of someone who has watched it unfold in real time. The silver lining, such as it is, arrives in the form of a correction she sees gathering on the horizon. Companies that have enthusiastically stacked AI tools on top of each other will begin to notice that their productivity has not, in fact, improved. It has cratered.
Hirsch points to research – she attributes it to Harvard – suggesting that companies with too many AI tools actually experience decreased productivity, because employees end up functioning as referees between competing outputs rather than doing the work the tools were supposedly hired to replace. She describes these employees as becoming “almost like parents,” which is presumably a reference to the experience of mediating between squabbling dependents rather than the joy of watching something grow. Three tools generating three different answers for the same brief is not efficiency. It is bureaucracy with a subscription fee. Someone still has to decide which output is least wrong, and that someone is a human whose afternoon has now been consumed not by creating content, but by babysitting the machines that were meant to create it.
Basics Will Be the Differentiator
Here is where Hirsch’s forecast pivots from grim to almost radical in its simplicity. The brands that will stand out in a flood of AI-generated content will not be the ones with the cleverest prompts or the most expensive tool stack. They will be the ones that have bothered to do the deeply unglamorous foundational work that nobody wants to talk about at conferences: clear branding, a defined point of view, a specific tone of voice, and genuine clarity on who their audience actually is. Hirsch puts it plainly – mastering the basics of branding, positioning, point of view, tone of voice, and target audience is what will separate the survivors from the slop merchants.
She frames this next part explicitly as a hope rather than a prediction, which is either refreshing honesty or a sign of how far the industry has drifted from common sense. Her hope is that the brands winning in 12 months will be the ones who prioritize quality over quantity “in such a distinct way” that they refuse to pump out 100 blogs a month for the sake of visibility. If that slows their growth, so be it. One might note that this is essentially an argument for doing the job properly, which is apparently now a contrarian position. We have arrived at a moment in B2B content where “know who you are talking to and why” qualifies as cutting-edge strategic insight.
AI Is Not Coming for Writing Jobs
Hirsch has tested the existential threat personally, which is more than most doomsayers can claim. She has given AI brand guidelines, tone of voice documents, and specific writing briefs. The output, she reports, has never been good enough. AI cannot do primary research – it cannot reliably find and cite a source. These are not exotic edge cases. They are the core requirements of B2B content work, which makes AI’s inability to handle them roughly equivalent to a taxi driver who cannot locate the steering wheel.
“It can’t do my job. I’ve tried. I’ve tried giving it brand guidelines. ‘Write me this blog with specificity.’ I’ve never seen it do a good job.”
The nuance Hirsch adds is worth noting, because it is the part most people skip. She is not arguing that AI is useless. She is arguing that it is a collaboration tool, not a replacement. The research still requires a person. The strategic framing still requires a person. The writing that actually sounds like a specific brand – as opposed to a generic approximation of all brands simultaneously – still requires a person. The question, as she frames it, is not whether to use AI but where a human can do it better and work with the tool more effectively, rather than simply stacking more tools on the pile. Presumably this is where the Harvard study comes back into the conversation, waving its findings like a cautionary flag that nobody is looking at.
Advice for Junior Writers: Go Beyond Your Scope
The standard advice dispensed to junior writers is “read more” and “write more,” which Hirsch regards as surface-level guidance – true in the way that telling someone to breathe is true, and approximately as useful for career advancement. Her actual recommendation is considerably more demanding: make your own opportunities by deliberately expanding beyond your job description. Ask the sales team what they do. Request a 30-minute demo of the tools your colleagues use. Volunteer to write Instagram captions, PR briefs, or whatever format you have not attempted yet. The point is not to become a designer or a salesperson. The point is to understand the ecosystem your writing lives inside, because writing is never just writing.
Hirsch credits her own career development to a mentor during an internship who gave her the space to ask what she describes as a probably annoying number of questions. She asked about sales processes, design workflows, Figma templates – none of it remotely within her job description. Her mentor’s response to these inquiries was not “stay in your lane” but “go ask them for a demo,” which is either unusually generous management or a recognition that curiosity is the one thing that actually compounds over time. The advice Hirsch distills from this experience – “ask questions, be annoying, and create those opportunities” – is not the kind of thing you embroider on a throw pillow. It is, however, the kind of thing that separates people who write blogs from people who build careers.
The Single Biggest Lesson: Writing Is the Deliverable, Not the Job
The final insight Hirsch offers is the one she clearly considers most important, and it has the hallmark of genuine experience: it sounds obvious until you realize almost nobody acts on it. Writing is the output. The job is everything underneath – understanding the client’s branding, their audience, their positioning, and what action the reader is supposed to take. When a client has clear branding, a defined tone of voice, and a specific audience, writing becomes dramatically easier. When those foundations are missing, no amount of raw talent compensates. The hardest clients to write for are not the ones in impenetrable technical industries. They are the ones who have not done the strategic work that makes content possible in the first place.
“You’re never just writing. The writing is for someone to do something, and if you don’t know what that information is, how are you supposed to write well?”
Hirsch has made this point on LinkedIn with characteristic directness: she is not just a writer but a researcher, a questioner, someone who digs into the foundations before touching a keyboard. The writing is almost just the deliverable. Before that comes a whole onboarding process of interrogation, because that is what makes the writing a hundred times better. She is also, let us not forget, someone who is trying to sell you something – content marketing is not an exercise in altruism, and she has no interest in pretending otherwise. The power of the basics, she insists, is not a cliche. It is the difference between content that performs and content that simply exists, taking up space on the internet alongside everything else the AI tools have produced.
For the full interview breakdown, see our complete Expert Insight with Livia Hirsch.
Tools Mentioned in the Interview
The following tools and platforms were referenced during this conversation.
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