I was a guest on Andrew Au’s Chat B2B podcast recently. Andrew asks the best questions. This is the first of several parts of our conversation.
Andrew asked me how to protect creativity when efficiency becomes the dominant KPI.
My answer was, and is, that credibility is the new originality. Jump to 6:45 to hear this exchange.
We’re not going to beat sameness with more originality. AI can generate novelty on demand. The creative vending machine is open 24 hours. What it can’t produce is lived experience and the conviction to share it and take risks. That comes from having actually built the thing, carried the risk, lived the consequence.
I make the case for the builders. The people closest to the product, the service, the research. They’re the ones with the most credibility. They know exactly where the thing wins and where it falls short. Andrew called them the raw source of truth. He’s right.
I love what he said there, he said ‘raw.’ This is where credibility can go untapped. In many large enterprises, that source of truth can go undiscovered or get watered down before it ever reaches an audience. It passes through briefings, brand reviews, and multiple stakeholder approvals. At each step the message can lose value. A specific claim becomes generalized. The raw edge case is deprioritized or smoothed out.
Nobody sets out to do that. The traditional system does it.
In my years at Dell, Adobe, and VMware, the messages that tended to move buyers were the ones closest to that source of truth. At Dell Technologies, they came from former CISOs, security analysts and threat hunters. People who had carried the risk, made the tough calls or identified the hidden threats. At Adobe, from creators actually using the technology to accomplish new things. You can feel the difference when the message comes directly from the source. The claims get narrower and the language gets more specific.
That’s what credibility is: proximity to the truth of the work. In an era of AI search and agents, your credibility narrative will be written one way or another. The question is whether your own experts are the source or whether AI is filling the gap with whatever it can find.
Andrew noticed that brand and reputation seem to be taking a backseat to demand gen and direct response. We have to keep asking how an enterprise shows up as a credible partner, not just what any given piece of content can deliver this quarter.
These expert, builder voices exist in every organization. The challenge isn’t finding them. It’s building the conditions that let them be heard. And investing in them the same way we’ve historically invested in executives.
Tag a subject matter expert you know who is closest to the work and a potential breakout voice. If you are one, your time is now.
This post draws from a conversation on the Chat B2B podcast with Andrew Au. Full episode: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify.
