The Death of Resonance: Why AI Content Isn’t Working (And How to Fix It)

I know, you’re enamored with AI. So am I. But here’s an uncomfortable truth: AI-generated content is making audiences tune out.

I get over 20 cold marketing emails every day. Every single one is perfectly crafted, segmented, personalized, and timed. And every single one goes straight to spam.

And I bet you’re doing the same thing.

This isn’t just my inbox being cranky. Email reply rates have dropped by more than 50% since 2019, even as personalization has skyrocketed. We’re producing more content than ever, but connecting less than ever.

The problem isn’t AI itself—it’s that everyone’s using it the exact same way.

The Great AI Content Flood

Some days it feels like we’ve leaped ahead a generation in just a few short years. The tools are extraordinary. We can produce more, faster, with fewer resources. It’s not science fiction anymore. It’s Tuesday morning.

For smaller teams especially, AI has been a game-changer. Insights that used to take weeks now happen in minutes. Productivity barriers have crumbled. For the first time in modern marketing, almost anyone can do more with less.

But here’s the catch: when everyone has the same superpower, no one does.

But those first mover productivity advantages are evaporating fast, and we’re left with some unfortunate market corrections:

• Declining Engagement. More posts, more emails, more ads. But not necessarily more impact.
• AI Fatigue. Surveys show 55% of people view AI-driven communications negatively. Even worse, 80% say they’d disengage from brands that lean too hard on automation.
• Trust Barriers. For B2B challenger brands, trust is still largely built by humans. And we’re becoming less human by the day.

This is the perfect time to change our question from “How can AI help me scale?” to “How can AI help create deeper connections“

When Everything Sounds the Same, Nothing Gets Heard

Resonance isn’t just about crafting a polished message. It’s about how that message lands when it arrives in someone’s inbox, at that particular moment, in the context of their day and their problems.

If your communication feels indistinguishable from everyone else’s, people won’t even give it a chance. They tune it out by default. And once they stop listening, earning their attention back is incredibly hard.

There’s an economic principle called Goodhart’s Law that explains what’s happening: when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric. When brands focus solely on using AI to pump out more messages (even following so-called best practices), we’re collectively teaching our audiences to ignore us.

Case in point: we’ve heard for decades that personalized marketing drives more engagement, right? Well, now that everyone’s doing it (thanks, AI), it’s having the opposite effect, as we see with the significant decline in email reply rates even as personalization has increased.

Source: Outreach Insights Group

In marketing, good tactics stay good only until everyone adopts them. The old business book Differentiate or Die feels more relevant today than when it was written in 2000.

Ten Ways to Make Your AI Content More Human

This doesn’t mean abandoning AI or going back to spray-and-pray email blasts. But it does mean using AI differently than everyone else is using it.

Here’s how to bring humanity back to your content:

1. Break AI Tasks Down Into Bite-Sized Pieces

Instead of asking AI to write an entire blog post, ask for one thing at a time: outlines, research, supporting points, data gathering. This naturally leads to more detailed prompts and keeps you in charge of the overall flow and personality.

2. Feed AI Real Human Experiences

Use spoken transcripts, interviews, or voice memos as your starting material rather than generic prompts. This grounds your content in lived experience and original thought. The more unique human input you give AI as a foundation, the less it needs to go to the internet to regurgitate what’s already been said.

3. Turn Your Team Into Thought Leaders

Encourage your subject matter experts to share insights through conversations, voice recordings, or interviews. Then use AI to polish their words. Pair this with a system where colleagues repost and engage, reinforcing both individual and brand authority.

Many of your experts won’t be trained writers, so coach them to speak directly to your target audience, ditch the jargon, and balance depth with clarity.

4. Build a Brand-Specific AI Model

Move beyond one-off prompts to a customized AI model trained on your brand voice, differentiators, and buyer journey stages. This creates a feedback loop where you can refine mistakes and continuously improve your content quality.

5. Tell Real Stories

People don’t remember endless opinions. They remember stories—your customers, your employees, your mission. Stories create connection, and connection creates trust.

6. Embrace the Imperfect

Content that feels too polished feels machine-made. Intentionally leave in small imperfections: a quick anecdote, a conversational aside, even humor or vulnerability. It signals that a human was behind the words.

7. Mix Up Your Formats

Pair AI-assisted writing with audio clips, short videos, or visuals created by real people in your organization. This blend reinforces authenticity while still letting AI help with organization and repurposing.

8. Draw From Your Actual Culture

Have AI structure content around your team’s real ways of working: your rituals, events, customer wins, or even Slack conversations. This pulls your brand voice from lived culture instead of generic internet patterns.

9. Co-Create With Your Audience

Use AI to facilitate audience interaction: polls, Q&As, curated responses. Then highlight those inputs in your content. Resonance grows when customers see themselves in the brand story.

10. Show Your Process

Occasionally share how you co-created with AI: what you contributed, what the machine did, and why. Audiences are increasingly skeptical of hidden automation, but showing the process builds trust.

TRY THIS: A simple but effective approach we use at Rocketship: (a) pick a topic, (b) research the search results to find a unique angle and keyword cluster, (c) write 5-7 questions around that cluster, (d) send those questions to your subject matter expert and ask them to identify a key insight for each question with a short example, (e) record the interview using Zoom or another tool that creates transcripts, (f) feed the transcript into your custom brand AI and ask it to convert into a blog or social post using your brand voice guidelines.

This process forces your expert to distill their answer into something valuable while giving them the freedom to get there conversationally.

The Bottom Line

The companies that win in the AI era won’t be the ones who generate the most content. They’ll be the ones who connect most deeply with their audience.

AI isn’t going anywhere. But neither is the human need for authentic connection. The brands that figure out how to use AI to amplify their humanity (rather than replace it) will be the ones still resonating when the content flood recedes.