AI Has No Nuance — And That's Your Competitive Advantage

There's a moment in almost every conversation about AI where someone leans back and says, "so, does this mean we're all out of a job?" It's a fair question. But I think it's the wrong one.

The better question is: "what can AI never do that I can?"

After years of working in marketing — first in-house, then as a fractional CMO, and now running Cemoh, arguably the largest fractional marketing network in Australia — I've come to a clear conclusion.

The thing that makes you irreplaceable isn't your ability to write fast, or research quickly, or produce content at scale. AI can do all of that. What AI cannot do is you. It has no nuance. And nuance is everything.

What I Mean by Nuance

Let me give you a concrete example. We recently created an ebook — The 10 Things You Need to Do Before You Become a Fractional CMO — that I'm genuinely proud of. Here's the thing: the first draft wasn't written by a copywriter. It wasn't even typed. I recorded a podcast. We transcribed it. Then we fed the transcript back to AI and said, "Turn this into an ebook."

And it worked. The output was clean, well-structured, and readable.

But here's the question I kept asking myself: whose work is that, really? The ebook exists because of twenty-plus years of experience I've built. It came from stories, mistakes, hard conversations with clients, and hard-won lessons about what actually moves the needle in marketing. The AI didn't generate that knowledge. It just packaged it.

That distinction matters more than most people realise.

Everyone can ask AI to write a blog post about marketing strategy. Tens of thousands of people are doing exactly that right now. The result is a tidal wave of competent, well-formatted, thoroughly mediocre content — all saying roughly the same thing, in roughly the same way, citing roughly the same sources.

What AI cannot produce is a blog post about marketing strategy written from your specific experience. It cannot write from your perspective. It doesn't know the client you worked with who turned over $10 million a year and wanted to get to $18 million, and the specific strategic conversation that followed. It doesn't know what you've seen fail spectacularly, or what surprised you by working. It cannot bring the kind of lived, textured knowledge to the table that separates real expertise from summarised expertise.

That's nuance. And it's yours.

The Content Flood Is Real — And It Creates Opportunity

Here's the paradox of the AI content era: yes, there is more content than ever. But there is also less distinctive content than ever. The signal-to-noise ratio is dropping fast, and audiences — especially sophisticated B2B buyers — are getting very good at sniffing out the generic.

So if you're a marketer, a consultant, a fractional CMO, or anyone in the business of helping companies grow, the opportunity isn't to out-produce AI. It's to out-distinguish yourself from it.

The way you do that is by leaning hard into perspective. Your specific perspective. The things you've observed, the patterns you've noticed, the contrarian positions you've developed through doing the work — not just reading about it.

I've sat across from enough business owners to know that when they're evaluating whether to bring in a fractional CMO, they're not reading generic blog posts about "what a fractional CMO does." They're looking for someone who sounds like they've been there. Who writes or speaks with the kind of specificity that only comes from experience. Who has an actual point of view, not just an aggregated one.

That's what cuts through. That's what AI cannot fake.

What AI Is Actually Good At (And How to Use It)

None of this is to say AI isn't useful. It's extraordinarily useful — but in a supporting role, not a lead one. At Cemoh, we use AI constantly. It accelerates the production of job descriptions, automates parts of our contracting and quoting process, and helps us turn raw thinking into polished content — exactly like the ebook I mentioned. My business partner, who has built and continues to evolve our platform, is doing work in a fraction of the time it would have taken two years ago. The leverage AI provides is genuinely remarkable.

But the thinking still comes from us. The strategy, the positioning, the judgment calls about what a client actually needs versus what they say they need — that's still human work. It has to be, because it draws on exactly the kind of contextual, experiential, nuanced knowledge that AI doesn't possess.

Think of it this way: AI is an excellent editor and a reasonable first drafter. It's a poor strategist and a terrible storyteller. The more you can give it to work with — your frameworks, your voice, your actual experiences — the better the output. The less you give it, the more it defaults to the generic.

The people who will win with AI are the ones who treat it as a tool to amplify their expertise, not a replacement for it.

Nuance Applies to Relationships Too

I want to zoom out for a second, because this isn't just about content. It applies to business development, to client relationships, to everything.

We're living through an era of aggressive digitalisation — AI-generated emails, automated LinkedIn sequences, chatbots handling the first five steps of every sales funnel. And in response to all of that, I've noticed something: the value of genuine human connection is going up, not down.

The business owners we work with — the ones running companies turning over $5 million, $10 million, $50 million — want to deal with people. Not just any people, but people they trust. People they've sat across from. People who remembered something they said six months ago and followed up on it.

I've had more conversations recently about the importance of getting people in a room together — lunches, events, coffees — than at any point in the past five years. Because everyone can feel the automation creeping in, and everyone is hungry for the alternative.

Nuance shows up in a room in a way it never will in an inbox. When you're sitting across from someone and they tell you something vulnerable about their business, and you respond with something genuinely insightful because you've been there — that's a moment AI cannot replicate. That's a relationship being built.

And relationships, as anyone who's been in business long enough knows, are where most of the actual business comes from.

A Practical Framework: Where to Lean In

So how do you actually operationalise this? How do you make nuance a competitive advantage rather than just an abstract idea?

A few things I think are worth doing deliberately:

Document your perspective, not just your knowledge. There's a difference between writing about what a fractional CMO does and writing about why the way most companies think about fractional CMOs is wrong, based on the patterns you've seen. The first is information. The second is perspective. Lean toward the second.

Use your experience as source material. If you're creating content — and you should be — anchor it in specific situations. Real client conversations (anonymised where needed). Real decisions. Real outcomes. The specificity is what makes it believable and memorable. AI can't manufacture this. You're the only one who has it.

Have the conversation before you write the content. This is one of the most underrated content strategies I've come across. Talk through your ideas — with a colleague, on a podcast, in a voice note to yourself. Then transcribe and edit. You'll find that the conversational version of your thinking is almost always richer and more distinctive than the written version you'd produce from scratch.

Be consistent, not just creative. One of the things I find myself saying to people building consulting businesses is that consistency beats creativity. Showing up with your perspective, reliably, week after week — even when the individual piece isn't your best work — builds something that sporadic brilliance never will. An audience, a reputation, a body of work that AI cannot compete with because it reflects you over time.

The Bigger Picture

I don't think written content is going to become less valuable. I think it's going to become more stratified. The generic stuff will be everywhere and worth very little. The distinctive, experienced, human stuff will be rarer — and worth considerably more.

We're seeing the same dynamic play out in retail, of all places. The retailers that are struggling are the ones that haven't changed since 2005. The ones that are thriving are the ones offering something irreplaceable — an experience, a discovery, a reason to show up that goes beyond the transaction. The product is almost secondary.

Content, and marketing more broadly, is heading in the same direction. The transaction — the information, the explanation, the generic advice — is being commoditised by AI. What isn't commoditised is the experience of engaging with someone who genuinely knows what they're talking about, has lived through it, and is sharing something that only they could share.

That's the work worth doing. And the good news is, the more AI proliferates, the more valuable it becomes.

Simon Dell is the CEO of Cemoh, Australia's largest fractional marketing network. Cemoh connects businesses with experienced fractional CMOs and marketing professionals — people embedded in the business, not just consulting from a distance. If you're thinking about going fractional, or looking for senior marketing expertise for your business, you can find out more at cemoh.com.