By Jane Dornemann

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Microsoft has become the second company in the world to achieve a market valuation of $4T—yeah, that’s a T. Microsoft as a whole saw 18% YoY growth, which emboldened the company, for the first time ever, to break out its earnings by division. Azure brought in $75B for the year. 
• Of course, we all know how it feels to have that kind of casual cash burning a hole in your pocket. Personally, I’d get in on the Labubu craze. Instead, Microsoft chose to spend $30B on capital for AI in one quarter. 
• Microsoft also released a new report that listed the top jobs expected to be replaced by AI. In the top five: interpreters and translators; historians; passenger attendants; service sales representatives; and writers and authors. Not on the list: dog trainers! Job security and puppies? Let’s do this.
• Amazon’s Q2 earnings were less impressive than Microsoft’s and Google’s, with the cloud division growing 17.5% over the last few months. CEO Andy Jassy said there’s a Wall Street narrative that AWS is falling behind in AI. The rest of Jassy’s statement shows a company that’s doing this thoughtfully and acknowledges that it’s still “so early” for generative AI. Amazon has a well-known bring-your-dog-to-work policy. So those puppies I mentioned earlier? They may also be a distraction… 
• AWS is dipping out of a third data center in Louisa, VA. And you thought those NIMBYs airing their grievances on Nextdoor were all talk!
• AWS is also working on cooling technology for Nvidia’s GPUs, using a new system called IRHX. 
• AWS gave $1B in cloud credits to the Trump administration. They say rich people love a good deal, and that’s one hefty coupon. 

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• Move over potatoes, Idaho is here for nuclear energy! AWS is working with the Idaho National Laboratory to advance energy research and development using AWS. Why? The tech giant joins Microsoft in looking for more sustainable ways to power AI data centers. “Power is AI’s single biggest constraint,” says Jassy. 
• GitLab is teaming up with AWS for the next three years to make its single-tenant GitLab Dedicated platform more accessible. This will help regulated industries and public sector teams remain compliant in the cloud. At the same time, GitHub’s CEO stepped down and Microsoft moved GitHub into its CoreAI division. 

New stuff 

• AWS is making two new models from OpenAI available on its platform. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! 
• Microsoft and Databricks created a new integration so that Microsoft Fabric users can access Azure Databricks tables directly and query the latest data without copying or moving anything. 
• Microsoft has integrated Chat GPT 5 into its full portfolio of AI-powered tools. And while some users call the newest generation of the GPT “emotionally distant,” I’d honestly feel bad ordering someone I really vibed with to do all my busy work. Frenemies, mmkay? 
• AWS has opened a marketplace only for AI and agents, so expect to see a flood of partners earning their AWS AI Competencies to gain access. 

By Andrea Swangard

Image by Emily Zheng

Animation is the espresso shot of B2B marketing: short, powerful, and guaranteed to wake people up. Done right, it can turn “just browsing” into “tell me more” in under a minute. Done wrong, it’s another skipped video in someone’s feed. 

Want your animation to stop the scroll and help people remember your message? Here are our top five tips. 

1. Know where it’ll live and why it’s there 

Before you break out the storyboards, determine the goals for your animation and where it’s going to play. 

• Solving a customer headache? 
• Explaining a product feature? 
• Pumping up the crowd before a keynote? 

Your goals (such as awareness, education, and sales enablement) and locations (such as landing page, event screen, and social platforms) will decide everything from length to tone to design style. That epic two-minute deep dive video might work great on your website, but folks may not sit through it at a conference. 

2. Get inside your audience’s heads 

Who’s watching? What do they need from you? Are they… 

• …a hands-on tech lead who wants the details? 
• …an exec who only needs the “why it matters” in 30 seconds? 
• …someone who has never heard of you before? 

The more you know about where your audience is coming from, the easier it’ll be to maintain engagement by serving them exactly the right amount of detail (at the right length). 

3. Match the design to the moment 

Different animations work for different audiences. Think about: 

• Where it’ll play: On a big screen at an event? On your LinkedIn? Embedded in a sales deck? 
• What you’ve got: Are you starting with brand assets? Need custom illustrations? Going heavy on UI mockups or stock footage? 
• How you’ll amp it up: Voiceover? Music? Sound effects? All of the above? 

An event “sizzle” might need bold graphics, fast cuts, and exciting music. A product demo? Go for clean UI animation and a voiceover that explains without overwhelming. 

4. Keep feedback flowing 

Animations take shape one layer at a time. Routine feedback sessions keep the creative process aligned with your brand and objectives. Expect to review: 

• Scripts and messaging
• Storyboards and style frames
• Animation previews with text, brand, and polish 

Schedule regular check-ins and keep relevant people in the loop. Nothing kills momentum faster than a two-week wait for feedback. 

5. Plan your timeframe…and add buffer 

A high-quality animation doesn’t happen overnight. Depending on complexity, expect 6–10 weeks from kickoff to final delivery. Add more buffer if you need a complex UI, custom illustrations, or a few extra rounds of tweaks. 

Plan ahead, especially if you’re targeting an event date or campaign launch, and give your team enough time to review without cutting corners. 

Bring your story to life 

The best marketing animations are clear, audience-focused, and designed with purpose, but they also have a spark that makes people want to watch. Nail our five tips and your animation will do more than look good—it’ll deliver results. Need some inspo? Check out our latest sizzle reel. Ready to make your story move? Let’s chat! 

By Liz Mangini, Jane Dornemann

Marketing budgets are tight, and the excitement around generative AI and agentic AI is palpable. Yet, in practice, applying it is often more complicated than it first appears. Launching a joint go-to-market (GTM) campaign with partners is a prime example. In a perfect world, both parties could brainstorm content ideas, then feed AI brand guidelines and transcripts to generate emails, one-pagers, and webinar decks. But joint marketing efforts come with an extra layer of relationship context that AI can’t quite decipher. How can generative AI get multiple partners to agree on a messaging direction when they don’t? What can it do for collaborative offerings that come with a bit of competition for the spotlight? 

There’s a lot of highly human, nuanced negotiation that happens in co-marketing—it’s a bit like therapy. So, we set out to see where we can best apply generative AI to important activities across joint GTM efforts, and where we can’t. Here’s what we learned about where AI shines and where it falls flat. 

Working through messaging hierarchies 

Falls flat 
Two or more brands with competing offerings and stories have different priorities, and generative AI struggles to grasp those dynamics. It can’t resolve alignment or make judgment calls on which messaging tier should take precedence. 

Shines
Only after humans create a joint messaging framework can AI help. Once the hierarchy is established, generative AI can apply that framework consistently in content generation. 

Ensuring content sticks to all brand and legal guidelines 

Falls flat
Generative and agentic AI often leave out important brand or legal guidelines—especially when navigating 100-page brand guides. They miss nuances, like Oxford comma usage, shifting partner rules, or strict naming guidelines, enforced by hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.  

Shines 
If you’ve built an AI agent in-house, you can train it over time to retain and enforce the rules. AI can serve as a second set of eyes when it comes to compliance, such as running completed content through the agent to catch violations and suggest corrections, ensuring co-branded assets stay publishable and eligible for marketing development funds (MDF). 

Distilling shared value propositions 

Falls flat 
Multi-partner GTM motions require telling a joint story that highlights the “better together” value. Generative AI can’t conduct interviews, facilitate stakeholder discussions, or navigate political tensions between product and marketing teams. It also can’t pull insights from sales calls or uncover the discovery work needed to align on shared value. 

Shines 
Generative AI can describe features and benefits once humans define the shared value—such as articulating how two services complement each other. It’s effective at polishing and amplifying agreed-upon value statements, but not at generating them from scratch. 

Drafting GTM content 

Falls flat 
Relying on generative AI to draft long-form copy from research alone often produces content that lacks authenticity. It can’t capture the nuance of customer pain points or the storytelling required for a strong narrative. 

Shines 
Generative and agentic AI excel at supporting research, surfacing data points (with sources if prompted), and refining human-written drafts. Once you have a strong narrative, AI can repurpose messaging for derivative assets, like social copy, web blurbs, or social cards, and adjust content for different personas and industries when provided with strong, research-based prompts. 

Why the hybrid model works best 

It’s undeniable that generative and agentic AI offer valuable scalability and efficiency, but they are limited when it comes to understanding complex human interactions, creativity, and context within a multi-partner GTM strategy. That’s why we’ve made AI a support tool rather than a replacement for human oversight.  
 
By combining AI’s speed and efficiency in refinement and content creation with human-generated baseline content, you can accelerate the GTM process. Add AI to a mix of strategic insight and the creative expertise of experienced marketers, and you can use both to deliver high-quality, aligned, and impactful content that meets everyone’s needs in a multi-partner ecosystem. 

By Suzanne Calkins, Carolyn Lange

Image by Nicole Todd

This year has brought a steady stream of new-to-us brands, each with its own style, assets, and way of working. And just like any new adventure, we weren’t quite sure what was in store for us when we set out. Some of these new projects kicked off at the trailhead with just a color palette and a deadline, while others were already at the final mile—sharing polished brand systems and guidelines. We found ways to adapt to both, drawing on our experience as creative problem-solvers and collaborators to guide each project to a strong, on-brand finish.  

Whether we’re following a well-worn map or forging ahead on what years of expertise tells us, we’ve learned a few things about how to navigate the process.  

Under-developed design toolkits: When we kick things off with a new brand, we typically ask for a design onboarding session where our designers can review available references and identify areas that need clarification. If brand guidelines are light, we’ll look for clues in the wild—published assets, LinkedIn posts, or campaign examples that hint at their intended direction. From there, we guide the conversation: What tone are you hoping to strike? What visual details do you love (or hate)? When the client isn’t sure yet, our designers draw on years of experience and pattern recognition to offer strong starting points and explore multiple options. We help clients see what they want, often before they know how to ask for it. 

Well-established design guidelines: On the flip side, when brands have comprehensive toolkits we carve out extra time to go through all available resources. We also ask early on if there needs to be a brand review process, then build that step into our timelines.  

And now the fun part! Here’s a snapshot of what we’ve been up to recently: 

Neo4j  

We riffed in real time, tested a bolder color palette, and reshaped social posts and decks for more punch. Consistent client collaboration kept the work fresh and cohesive across every asset. 

Google

We drew inspiration from a file-folder motif and ran with it. It served as the basis for navigating a 70+ page document.  

Auth0 (Okta)

We worked closely with available references and brand cues to shape a visual direction that respected identities of both Auth0 and the larger Okta family. 

Carrier

An in-progress Figma from the Carrier brand team became the blueprint for our Lynx design.  

Contact our team to speak with a consultant and see more examples of our designs in the wild. 

By Katy Nally

Image by Suzanne Calkins

When the lovable lawyer with questionable judgment Saul Goodman got his own show, we celebrated. When Fraiser Crane changed his backdrop from the Cheers bar to his Seattle apartment, we kept watching as his backstory unfolded. Hollywood loves a good spin-off, and so do we. 

In the content marketing world, the spin-off just got a whole lot easier thanks to generative AI. A few prompts can yield a whole bunch of new assets based on the original. But the narratives are only as good as the initial inputs. If those are too fluffy or redundant, the spin-off content won’t say much and will drown in the sea of spam. 

That’s why messaging and positioning frameworks (MPFs) have been a top-selling asset for 2A this year. These documents pack in a ton of information about a solution’s value, reasons customers should believe in it, and real-world use cases applicable to various industries. MPFs explain the differentiated benefits of our clients’ solutions, which is exactly the kind of detail you need for AI to create a standout spin-off asset like a hero ebook. 

For companies just getting started with AI-generated content, we recommend this approach. Start with a human-created MPF that involves your whole team in the process and nails down exactly what you want to say. We’ll act as the conversation facilitators to pull out salient points, then we’ll capture them in customer-ready copy. From there, we can save you some time and money by using our AI tools to generate an ebook based on your MPF. 

Essentially, do the hard work up front for a better payoff in the end. That is, after all, how Hollywood does it. 

By Jane Dornemann

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Microsoft is having a rough month for PR. First, Gizmodo reports, “Microsoft Is Firing About 9,000 People Because Business Is Great.” As the company’s profits and stock hit historic highs, it let go of just under 4% of its workforce globally. Sales, customer service, and software engineering were all affected. Some developers are allegedly being replaced by the AI they helped build.
• For the newly jobless, a Microsoft executive suggests they console themselves with AI—he even gave them prompts.
• Microsoft isn’t the only cloud company cutting staff. AWS laid off hundreds in July. However, like Microsoft, it’s not just AI and automation driving these layoffs. While official reports are hard to find, there is much chatter here and elsewhere that the bigger influence is offshoring jobs to India and the Philippines, in part prompted by the shaky status of the H-1B visa program that brought those workers here to the US.
• Microsoft’s Maia AI chip is delayed by at least six months and even then, once it goes into production, it’s expected to fall short of NVIDIA’s Blackwell chip. I believe what you felt reading that is called schadenfreude. 
• Analysts say Microsoft has so far captured the largest amount of generative AI spend in the market. Nearly 60% of CIOs plan to increase Azure spending next year, with 97% planning to adopt AI tools.
• What does the next fiscal year hold for Microsoft? The cloud giant will increase investments in migrating companies from VMware platform to Azure; boost partner funding and incentives across Copilot, Azure, and Microsoft 365; and will introduce several new partner specializations and designations. 

Wheelin’ and dealin’  

Meta and AWS are collaborating on a program that will provide six months of technical support from their engineers, plus our favorite form of currency, AWS cloud credits, to 30 startups building AI tools using Llama AI. I have no doubt Meta will use these tools responsibly. If you have a conversation about monkeys and then get a bunch of monkey videos on your Facebook page, that is purely a coincidence, I don’t know what to tell you.  

Professional pivots 

• The VP and general manager of generative AI at Amazon has peaced out to work for Siemens. He led AI product strategy at AWS but surely an AI agent can do his job, no? A fun fact in the article: In its efforts to lure OpenAI employees away, Meta has been offering $100M sign-on bonuses. That was not a typo.
• Snowflake snatched away the AWS Managing Director of Industries and Solutions. Also out the door after 17 years is Kevin Miller, the AWS Global Data Center VP. 

New stuff  

• New solutions and services from AWS this month include OracleDatabase@AWS, which is generally available in some US Regions; AWS Builder Center, a new online hub where AWS users can share ideas, access learning resources, join community programs, and vote on feature requests; and Kiro, which will help developers write code from AI.
• Ten years ago, I was getting these terrible ice pick headaches deep in my dome piece and I went to the doctor, and he was like it’s probably scalp pain. I said no, it isn’t. Then he said oh it’s probably anxiety. I said no, it isn’t. Then I got a CT scan and it was a brain tumor! True story! So when Microsoft says a study showed its AI can diagnose 400% better than doctors, not only do I believe them, but I would add to the list of other things that can out-diagnose many doctors: balls of lint, naked mole rats, rocks.
• While Microsoft AI is diagnosing you instead of a doctor, AWS can help with surgery. AWS, NVIDIA, and Johnson & Johnson have launched the Polyphonic AI Fund for Surgery, a grant program for building AI tools aimed at improving care before, during, and after operations. (Just don’t sprinkle any of that J&J powder on my organs. Or their hip implants. Or their birth control. Or Risperdal. Actually, yes to the Risperdal.)
• The AWS Summit in New York was home to several announcements, starting with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. It’s a modular, enterprise-grade platform that enables organizations to deploy, manage, and scale secure AI agents at production-level. The underlying advantage is that it “bridges the critical gap between proof of concept and production for AI agents.”
• Other announcements of note: A $100M investment in agentic AI developments through the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center and a new AI agent Marketplace, in partnership with Anthropic. An update to Copilot Vision for Windows will allow the tool to see everything that’s on your screen, including browser windows.
• Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic created The National Academy of AI Instruction to train 400,000 K-12 teachers on AI over the next five years, with a flagship campus in NYC.
• Project Rainier from AWS is a colossal, highly efficient “AI supercomputer” that links hundreds of thousands of custom Trainium2 chips across multiple data centers. This will give AI developers like Anthropic about 5x more power (isn’t that exactly what tech companies need right now?) to train next generation models. 
• Blaxel thinks AWS and Microsoft don’t have the right infrastructure to handle AI agents at scale—and it’s already seeing significant traction. Palantir is also going toe-to-toe with AWS by offering an integrated platform for building sophisticated data and AI applications.  

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• SharePoint servers, including those belonging to governments around the world, healthcare providers, and energy companies, came under attack and a “broad level of compromise” this month when hackers took advantage of an “undisclosed digital weakness” discovered by a third-party security firm. At least 50 servers have been successfully compromised, leading Palo Alto Networks to describe this ongoing issue as a “high-severity, high-urgency threat.” 
• To get around a government requirement that only US citizens with security clearances may access Defense Department data, Microsoft used a workaround: “digital escorts” that carried out tasks from engineers in China on sensitive Pentagon cloud systems—even though many of these escorts didn’t understand how to catch potential threats.  

By Carolyn Lange

The anatomy of a high-performing email send 

Remember those chain emails from the early aughts? They were like tiny inbox surprises wrapped in weird promises like, “Forward this to 10 people or you’ll be cursed with lice forever,” or “Send this and your crush will take you to Burger King.” Some were absurd, some were oddly sweet, and the best ones had just enough charm to make me hit forward (for kicks and giggles). 

Eventually, though, the chain letters lost their magic. I tuned out when the messages didn’t change and that sense of connection I felt with the sender was lost. 

That’s what happens when your marketing emails start sounding the same. They become noise. At 2A, we treat each send like a fresh chance to connect, with clear, focused content that’s just different enough to earn a click. 

One recent email earned a 47% open rate and 25% click rate—well above peer benchmarks of 30% and 4%. Here’s what made it land so well. 

Nail the first impression 

This subject line is conversational, but not chatty. It introduces tension without sounding dramatic, and it sidesteps all the usual buzzwords that scream “marketing email.” 

We also use preview text that sets expectations and suggests that something helpful is waiting inside: “Tips to get partner content back on track.” 

Catch those eyes 

This collage-style design gives the email a distinct look without overwhelming the content. The combination of motion, color, and texture shows that we care about the details.  

Make it worth their time 

Got a tangle of partner or industry marketing content that’s hard to manage? It can quickly spiral out of control when teams repurpose the message without a clear strategy.   

Learn how to tame your messaging Hydra and build scalable assets that actually work. 

Right out of the gate, the email content names the problem. It acknowledges the reader’s reality with clarity and zero condescension. It also offers a clear, actionable promise without overselling. The brevity makes it feel more like a helpful nudge than a pitch, and the line about taming a messaging Hydra adds just the right bit of fun personality. 

Get the click 

The CTA closes the loop on the message by pointing to an outcome the reader can expect by clicking, instead of an offer. It’s visually bold and verbally simple. 

Optimize for your audience  

Our audience list is a living thing. We’ve spent years honing it, curating a group that’s relevant, engaged, and genuinely interested in what we send. We maintain it regularly and filter out bots to ensure our performance data reflects real human behavior. We even use an AI spam checker to find language that might be flagged by the filters. 

This email worked because it felt real. It had a point. It respected the reader’s time. And even though it resonated especially well with partner marketers, it was designed to connect with anyone dealing with messy content. 

Not every audience will respond to the same tone, format, or pacing. But the principle holds: if your email feels like it could’ve been written for anyone, it probably won’t matter to anyone. 

Say something specific. Sound like someone. That’s the bar worth meeting. And if your email sends could use a little extra spark, let’s talk. 

By Liz Mangini

Image by Emily Zheng

At 2A, we know joint go-to-market (GTM) strategies can feel like a fast-paced game, with multiple teams running different plays, shifting priorities, and high stakes. But we’ve also seen how well-executed webinars act like game-winning plays, turning alignment into leads, pipeline, and real revenue impact. Investing in the story of a webinar up front can have a big payoff in the end. Not only does the process align teammates on a single narrative, but it also fuels a flywheel of content to continuously generate leads. 

Bringing your whole team along 

When your joint GTM motion spans multiple organizations—yours, a cloud provider, plus one or more partners—the biggest risk isn’t lack of effort. It’s misalignment. Developing a GTM webinar, live or recorded, can fix that. When we create webinar decks and talk tracks for clients, we pull information from marketing, sales, alliance, and product teams to build a narrative that brings all major players onto the field. They’re involved in shaping the overall story and at the same time, they hear how their solutions are being positioned to customers. 

• Cloud sellers learn the narrative firsthand 
• Alliance teams understand co-sell plays 
• Product knows what’s being promised
• Cloud partners see where they fit 
• Buyers see joint value 

When done well, a joint GTM webinar gets watched, discussed, and shared—not just with customers, but by internal teams as well. When everyone understands the story, they tell it better, and that clarity shows up in how your message lands with customers, building trust and accelerating deals. 

Fueling content flywheels 

Winning teams don’t treat webinars as one-and-done events. They build them as multi-use assets to drive further value across marketing, sales, and alliances. At 2A, we’ve helped teams at AWS, Microsoft, and partner ecosystems repurpose webinars into blog posts, video clips, slides, social content, and follow-ups. These assets have generated dozens of qualified leads when used as gated content or incorporated into targeted LinkedIn campaigns.   

The next time you’re planning a GTM motion, ask yourself: What’s the one message we want every partner, seller, and customer to take away? Build your webinar around that, then watch the alignment happen and leads follow.

And, if you need help, you know where to turn! 

By Andrea Swangard, Felip Ballesteros

Image by Nicole Todd

Marketing content often starts with a strong, clear message. Maybe it’s a compelling value proposition, a punchy pitch, or a narrative everyone’s excited about. But as that message is adapted across campaigns, formats, and partner collaborations, things can quickly spiral. Like the Hydra from Greek mythology, which grew two new heads for every one that was cut off, efforts to scale your story can quickly split into multiple directions.  

The challenge isn’t having too many heads—it’s making sure that they’re in sync. Without clear direction, your hero asset spawns offshoots that feel disconnected from the origin story you and your partners are trying to tell, drifting from repeatable, core ideas into vague or even competing narratives. If you’ve tried to scale a strong message across a joint campaign and ended up with a tangle of inconsistent materials, you’ve met the messaging Hydra.  

The good news? You don’t need to slay the Hydra. You just need a smarter way to guide it. 

Scaling without losing the thread 

The best place to start is by creating a shared story. Without that foundation, assets start to drift: a blog post might highlight different benefits than the sales deck, and a co-branded ebook might clash with your product page. That’s where a messaging and positioning framework (MPF) becomes essential. A strong MPF doesn’t force a one-size-fits-all message. Instead, it offers a consistent set of foundational messages, benefit language, and partner positioning that can be customized for each audience. Think of it as a flexible toolkit, not a script. 

To be useful, your MPF should be concise, accessible, and built to support creativity. If it’s a 20-page PDF no one reads, it’s time for a rethink. The most effective frameworks help teams work faster and stay aligned, while still leaving room for the nuance that makes content resonate. That’s how you scale your story without losing the plot.  

The myth of one-size-fits-all messaging 

Repurposing a strong message for a new vertical sounds easy: swap in a few industry terms and publish. But that surface-level approach rarely resonates. Customers know when content has been stickered over. It’s vague, it’s boring, and it often misses what actually matters to the audience. Effective scaling doesn’t mean repeating the same message everywhere. It means starting from shared core ideas, then adapting them to match the context. That means digging into the details: talking to subject matter experts, addressing timely industry concerns, and reshaping language, use cases, and tone accordingly. Whether it’s public sector efficiency mandates, AI scrutiny in healthcare, or tariff talk for supply chain folks, your story should feel rooted in what each audience is currently navigating. 

Course correct before chaos multiplies 

When you’re trying to scale a campaign, it’s tempting to spin up every format at once: an ebook, a deck, an infographic, etc. But if the content underneath isn’t strong and you’re missing data points, customer stories, or clear value props, those assets can end up looking good but saying very little. You risk ending up with a lot of Hydra heads with no brain! That’s when it’s worth pausing to evaluate what you’ve got. Do your current materials tell a complete, compelling story? Do they map to what your audiences actually care about? We can help assess your core content, flag gaps, and guide which formats will land best with the resources you have. Sometimes the smartest move isn’t to create more, but to sharpen what’s already there or to hold off until you’ve got the inputs to make a new asset worth building. 

Mitigate messaging mishaps 

Taming the Hydra isn’t about fighting it, it’s about guiding each head with intention. With the right starting point and a smart, flexible strategy, your core content can scale into a full ecosystem that’s as useful to your internal teams as it is compelling to your customers. 

Whether you’re planning a joint campaign with partners or trying to bring structure to your co-branded content, we can guide you down the best path (and keep those Hydra heads working in harmony). 

By Ashley JoEtta, Carolyn Lange

Image by Nicole Todd

You know the feeling.  

The writing checks all the boxes. Grammar? Fine. Structure? Present. But you’re three paragraphs in, and nothing’s landed. You’re not bored, exactly. Just…disconnected. We get it. AI-generated content can feel like the industry equivalent of a knockoff handbag: technically correct but missing the soul. In a sea of auto-generated sameness, people are craving content that sounds like it came from someone who gets them.  

That doesn’t mean swearing off AI. It means using it well and knowing how to add the human layer that keeps readers reading. 

At 2A, we don’t fear the tech—we use it. Joyfully and strategically. It helps us write faster and get out of our own heads. But we never let it replace the part that matters most: knowing our audience, holding your brand voice, and shaping a story with a bit of soul. 

When humans and AI work in harmony… 

You can feel it. When someone’s really shaped an idea and turned it over in their minds, it leaves a trace of intention, texture, and warmth. (Yes, B2B tech can have cozy stories.)  

Here’s what that might look like: 

• A point of view. There’s a pulse behind the prose. Real people have opinions. Great content does, too. 
• Intentional rhythm. Sentences vary in length and cadence, so content reads naturally. 
• Tone that fits the brand. It doesn’t just say the right things. It sounds like you. (Our tone? Smart, clear, and a little bit spicy.)
• Specificity. The messaging is grounded in real-world examples, offers concrete advice, or speaks from personal experience with a turn of phrase you can’t just copy and paste. 
• A sense of story. Even in B2B content, a good narrative structure pulls you through by giving you a reason to keep reading.
• Quotes, references, or punchlines. The kind of stuff you’d only get from a real person with a real perspective.
• A little imperfection. Maybe there’s an odd analogy. Maybe a dad joke sneaks in. That’s flavor. 

When AI is left to its own devices…  

The humans might just bounce. When the only fingerprints on the draft are digital, it’s obvious: 

• Repetitive phrasing. You know the ones: “Whether you’re an enterprise or SMB…” or “With the ever-evolving digital landscape…” You’ve read them hundreds of times. You’ve skipped them hundreds of times. 
• Keyword soup. Scalable, secure, seamless, innovative, robust, transformative… yawn.
• Over-structured sentence patterns. Every sentence begins with a prepositional clause, ends with an em dash, and sounds like it’s trying to win an award for formality. 
• Zero personality. It exists. It says a thing. You read it. But it could’ve come from anyone, and might as well be for no one. (It definitely wasn’t from us.)
• No story, just summary. You’ll get bullets and benefits, but not a sense of why it matters. 

Use AI, just don’t stop there 

We use AI all the time: to kickstart drafts, poke holes in our logic, suggest a dozen options we hadn’t thought of, or help us pressure-test structure and voice. But the magic doesn’t come from the model. When our storytellers use AI, they follow up by shaping structure, adding brand voice, and replacing autopilot phrasing with something real. 2A relies on human ears, human judgment, and human standards. 

Want content that sounds like you? Let’s talk. We promise not to write “leverage” in the first 100 words. (Probably.) 

Nerd Corner with Dr. Ash 

Corpus bias: When the data used to train a model doesn’t reflect the full range of voices, perspectives, or language patterns that exist in the real world. 

Most large corpora (the datasets AI models train on) skew toward what’s been published the most: dominant voices, formal registers, U.S.-centric norms. The result? Outputs that feel generic, repetitive, or off-brand. 

That’s why the human layer matters. A model can predict the next word. You can decide if it actually belongs.