Authentic Voices Outperform Scripted Ones in Modern Thought Leadership

Corporate thought leadership now outpaces the trust it earns. Brands keep dialing up production while audiences dial down attention. Marketing leaders are responding by surfacing internal operators whose conviction does the work that polish cannot.

Trisha McDonell is the Vice President of Public Relations, Brand, Social & Web at Flex, a global contract manufacturer that designs and builds products across consumer electronics, healthcare, automotive, and industrial categories. Her 25-year career spans tech PR for AMD at WE Communications, launching LEGO Education's first communications and social program, and revamping Expedia Group's global crisis communications program. That work has put her in close contact with the kind of internal voices who can carry a brand story without sounding rehearsed.

"Whoever is doing your thought leadership has to have passion for it. You don't want to force it," McDonell says. The most effective thought leadership starts with genuine conviction. The leaders who resonate most are the ones who are already deeply invested in the subject matter. Authenticity cannot be manufactured, and audiences can quickly tell the difference between assigned messaging and real passion. The role of communications is to identify those voices, help shape the narrative, and create the right opportunities for them to show up authentically.

Passion picks the spokesperson

Most enterprise thought leadership defaults to the chief executive. The CEO has the platform and the visibility, and a well-run program can earn coverage even when the underlying enthusiasm is thin. Audiences now read the difference between earned interest and assigned interest within a few sentences. The leaders who actually drive an initiative, who think about the problem on weekends, who would read the trade publication anyway, carry an authority that no amount of media training can reproduce.

"Companies naturally lean into the CEO voice, and that matters. But not every CEO wants to be the primary thought leader on every issue. Sometimes the strongest voices are the operators closest to the transformation, technology, or customer problem," McDonell says. McDonell scouts the rest of the leadership bench. She sits down with leaders running major initiatives, asks what they want to be known for, and matches their interests to topics no one in the company has claimed. Job title doesn't factor in.

Match the medium to the messenger

The right voice gets lost in the wrong medium. An operator who lights up in a small group will freeze on a teleprompter, and the conviction that justified the pick disappears with the body language. Some leaders write better than they speak. Some open up in a conversational interview. Others need the scaffolding of a moderated fireside chat to drop the performance reflex. Matching the format to the leader lets thought leadership read as a real person thinking. Mismatching it makes the work read as a brand deploying a spokesperson.

"How do executives like to show up? A lot of people don't like video, so do you need to do more written, more quotes, more of a conversational fireside chat? You have to meet them where they are," McDonell says. The decision carries more weight as production tools get cheaper. Any brand with a basic content budget can now afford broadcast-quality video. What still costs something is the willingness to put a leader on stage in their natural register and trust that conviction will outperform polish. The brands that get this tradeoff right end up with content that audiences actually finish.

Where AI earns its keep

The same standard applies to how brands use AI in customer-facing work. McDonell treats AI as a productivity layer, useful for accelerating execution and freeing creative time for the work that needs human judgment. At Expedia, McDonell worked closely with product and technology teams as the company expanded self-service and automation capabilities to help travelers resolve routine issues more efficiently, allowing customer support teams to focus on more complex or high-empathy situations. Most enterprise rollouts follow the same pattern, with AI handling the routine work and humans handling the moments where empathy actually matters. "AI is a great productivity tool, a great way to get things off the ground or to vet your idea. But it's not going to replace human imagination. You have to pair the two," McDonell says.

The trust problem shows up most visibly in advertising. McDonell points to a pattern in travel ads where AI-generated imagery sells a destination that doesn't exist. The breakdown sits at the strategy layer. AI delivers when it amplifies what a brand actually does, and falls apart when teams use it to fabricate what a brand cannot back up. Audiences clock the gap on the first impression, and trust collapses long before the metrics register the drop. "It's interesting seeing brands using more AI-generated content versus real people. You can tell it's AI-generated, and they're trying to talk about authentic experiences that aren't even a real place. People are craving that human touch," McDonell says.

Machines are reading the room

Even the strongest content needs to reach the right people. Attention spans run in nine-second cycles, and the platforms doing the discovery work reward content built for both human and machine readers. Generative engine optimization, the practice of structuring content so AI systems can synthesize it, has become as important as classic SEO for brands whose audiences increasingly get their answers inside a chat window. "The social platforms have become incredibly sophisticated at understanding audience behavior and surfacing the content people are most likely to engage with,” McDonell says. “Behind that is an entire SEO and discovery ecosystem designed to cut through an increasingly crowded information environment and capture attention in a meaningful way.”

The same logic extends well beyond social. McDonell tracks AEO and LLM pickup alongside the traditional placements and speaking invitations PR teams have always measured. The question is how Reddit, Wikipedia, owned blogs, and earned coverage are getting picked up by the AI models that audiences increasingly turn to. The content that performs in those channels already reads as genuine to humans. The investment pays back twice. "Another important consideration is how content is written and structured so AI systems can accurately surface and interpret it. Companies need to think beyond traditional SEO and consider how earned media, owned content, Wikipedia, and public forums shape how large language models understand and represent their brand," she says.

The trend question follows the same logic. Jumping on a viral moment that doesn't fit the brand undercuts the trust the rest of the work has built. McDonell tests trends in small bursts, gated by a real fit check before resources go in. "Does it align with the company's values and mission? Don't do it just because it's cool," McDonell says.

Bring it under one roof

McDonell's approach points to a deeper organizational question. PR, brand, marketing, and customer experience now blur into one continuous brand encounter from the audience's perspective, even when internal teams operate on separate budgets. The voices that earn trust, the formats that fit them, the AI doing the routine work, and the channels surfacing it all need to coordinate inside a single function. Marketing leaders who formalize that function move faster. "Most companies still manage communications, brand, digital, social, and customer experience in silos, but stakeholders don’t experience companies that way anymore. Reputation is built, or damaged, across every touchpoint simultaneously. Companies increasingly need a centralized reputation function that aligns narrative, trust, visibility, and response across the enterprise," McDonell says.