Contributed by Nicholas D. Evans Founder and CEO of Thinkers360 –
As AI-generated content floods the internet, how do we know who’s actually an expert anymore? Why businesses need better ways to distinguish genuine human expertise from AI-generated noise.
With business professionals increasingly using AI for content creation, finding authentic experts such as analysts, authors, consultants, influencers and speakers has become a growing challenge for tech brands and marketers looking for experts to support their campaigns or to lend strategic advice.
Even before today’s widespread use of AI for social media posts, articles, and even entire books, the challenge was separating the signal from the noise. The “signal” being true thought leadership and insight and the “noise” being masses of undifferentiated content.
For CMOs and their teams, finding authentic experts was a challenge even ten years ago due to the so-called fake follower crisis where influencers could easily purchase thousands of followers and spam trending hashtags to grow their rankings. While mostly a B2C issue at the time, it quickly spilled over into the B2B world.
The use of generative AI for content creation, as well as the use of agents for automated posting and commenting, has exasperated this issue making almost everyone on LinkedIn now sound like seasoned experts with decades of experience. Even over a year ago, it was estimated by SEO firm Graphite, as of May 2025, that more than half of new web articles were generated primarily by AI, up from just 5% before ChatGPT.
To help cut through the noise, here are three best practices which will help tech brands and marketers find and work with authentic experts for their niche:
Look at holistic thought leadership and specialist communities
Individual content pieces are notoriously hard to assess in terms of whether they are human authored, AI-augmented, or completely AI-generated. While there’s plenty of software tools which can help to some extent, there’s always a number of false positives and false negatives which can cloud the situation.
In identifying experts, it’s therefore important to review their full thought leadership profile and portfolio which may include articles, books, media interviews, podcasts, speaking, videos, webinars, whitepapers and much more. By considering the original content they produce, and their actual achievements, in terms of patents, businesses founded, and other relatively difficult to fake accomplishments, this can provide a far better measure of authentic expertise.
Specialist communities (e.g. expert networks, communities of interest) are another powerful destination for tech brands and marketers looking to source expertise. Thinkers360 found that consumers of thought leadership content cited specialist communities (60%) and social media channels (56%) as their primary sources for thought leadership content. All other destinations, other than individual and publisher web sites, were seen more as secondary sources than primary sources.
Know your expert’s DNA in terms of their personas and content
Rather than treating all experts as equal, it’s important to know your expert’s DNA. What’s their make-up in terms of the various hats they wear as an academic, advisor, analyst, author, consultant, influencer and speaker?
In our research, Thinkers360 found that unlike B2C influencers, B2B influencers identify with multiple personas, not just that of social media influencer. In fact, over 60% identified with 3 personas and over 50% identified with 6 personas.
From a content perspective, explore what they’re writing and speaking about (not measured by social media data, but real articles, books and keynotes), what are their values and perspectives, and how does this align with your company’s perspectives?
This approach of looking at personas and content helps you to get to know your experts on a more personal level and can help you better select your influencers for specific tasks. For example, you may need an influencer who’s also a well-respected author to help with some custom thought leadership content pieces, or you may need an influencer who’s also an established keynote speaker for your next event.
By looking at your expert’s DNA, and what they’re writing and talking about from a thought leadership perspective, you can get a far more accurate picture of their background, their interests, as well as the various kinds of content they produce.
Innovate your approach by looking beyond social media metrics
While many marketing agencies and pundits may advocate a specific approach, the reality is their approaches are often based on their own strengths and weaknesses. While we’ve been conditioned to look at social media data, tech influencers are far more complex and diverse in real life. Like looking for a needle in a haystack, searching by follower counts, hashtags and geographical location – or even reach, relevance and resonance – will only get you so far.
Thinkers360 asked real-world B2B influencers about the measures and metrics that were most effective for brands to gauge their expertise. Overwhelmingly, B2B influencers stated that holistic metrics (e.g. across all content) and portfolio (e.g. links to actual content) were the most effective measures and metrics. Interestingly, social media metrics (e.g. follower counts) were cited by only 11% as the most effective measures and metrics for brands to gauge their expertise.
Tech brands should look for solutions that challenge the industry narrative and go beyond social media alone. Break down the silos within your own marketing organization and encourage your product marketing, influencer marketing, AR/IR and other teams to explore how they can collaborate with one another when working across the expert ecosystem including analysts, authors, influencers and speakers. Since influencers don’t fit into a neat box, they’re likely important to many of your teams across branding, thought leadership, influencer marketing, content marketing, analyst and influencer relations and more.
Ten years ago, social media platforms posed challenges in identifying expertise due to fake followers and spamming. Today, AI-generated content presents far broader challenges to identifying expertise across the entire content landscape. How we identify and measure expertise needs to constantly evolve.
Nicholas D. Evans is the founder and CEO of Thinkers360, a leading digital thought leadership platform and expert marketplace as well as Innogentic.ai, an enterprise software platform for managing AI ideas, use cases and ROI. A former Chief Innovation & AI Officer at WGI, Chief Innovation Officer at Unisys, and Vice President Analyst at Gartner, he is an author, business columnist, and recipient of the Consulting Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award.
Guest Column: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Autonomy Magazine.
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