As someone who manages content production processes for a couple of consumer brands, I have noticed a significant transformation of one cost line in the budget over the past two years. In the past, all the first drafts were outsourced to agencies: product descriptions, social media posts, email campaigns, blog outlines. These days, most of that is done in-house within minutes, while those agencies whose services we still buy are responsible for the strategic part and editing.

What changed, and what did not

What is different is the price of an entry point. An empty document was once costly, since writing into it needed either an expert author or time-consuming effort from a marketer. What remains the same is the importance of judgment, recognizing what message is relevant, what claim is true, and what information will resonate with a particular customer. The generative tools brought down the first price to nearly nothing, while the second stayed exactly the same.

What this translates to practically speaking is that our writers are no longer battling with the blank page. Starting off with a rough draft, we take care of the tough job of trimming, polishing, verifying facts, and ensuring that there is concrete evidence that backs every statement made. While the output increased, the real success lies in the fact that there is a higher floor level for all the submissions we receive.

The risk nobody warns you about

There is a way for things to go wrong, and I have seen it happen. In a system where there is no cost associated with draft, there will be an urge to put out as much as possible. And putting out too much without any form of editing leads to production of low-quality text that is actually damaging to the brand image. Successful teams look at generation as merely an initial input which requires editing. You are working with a fast but shallow partner who needs the depth.

That’s why important are those platforms that rely on an actual workflow as opposed to being simply a gimmick. The marketer needs to go from ideas to writing to editing seamlessly, not wasting his time jumping through hoops. Tools like faddyai sit in that workflow gap, giving a small team a fast first draft so the human hours go into judgment instead of typing.

How small teams should budget for this

The one piece of advice I would give to any brand manager today is that they should shift focus, rather than slash budgets. The dollars saved on the draft should be allocated into those aspects of content development where the return on investment remains viable, such as research, story creation, design, and even dissemination. Today’s draft is cheap, quick, and cyclical.

It also alters your approach to experimenting. If a draft is nearly free, you are able to test a number of approaches and then publish those that succeed, rather than risking everything on one shot. A growing number of teams keep a few free AI tools in their stack specifically for this kind of low-risk testing before they commit real production resources.

The honest read

None of it is magic, and any marketer trying to sell you some sort of magic is doing something wrong. The thing that really changes here is how economical it now is to get things started, and that’s enough for a small marketing team to completely restructure their week. The brands that win are the ones who make better use of the time that was saved by being thoughtful and saying something concrete.

What good editing actually involves

The notion of editing a document generated by the software usually involves making just a few adjustments here and there; nothing complicated, really. Nothing can be further from the truth. In fact, editing starts with a careful analysis of the document’s structural integrity – does it have only one idea which each separate paragraph is aimed at developing? Most likely, it doesn’t, regardless of who is the author – a computer program or a person. The main job of an editor is to get rid of all unnecessary paragraphs and make sure the best idea comes right away.

Following structure is substance. This is the part of content creation when the brand team provides the actual evidence to turn an ordinary assertion into something convincing. A computer program cannot provide this evidence as it lacks the insight into your business, customers, and unique value proposition. Only you know what exactly makes people choose your product over others, and conveying this message is what distinguishes your content from all those generic posts created by competitors using the same technique.

Voice comes at the end of the process. There needs to be something unique about how the brand speaks; it should have its own voice. However, the generated content is void of all personality, stripped clean and made neutral because it does not belong to any single person. Finally, an editor needs to run the piece of content through the brand’s voice, making sure that everything about the content aligns and makes it sound as though it came straight from your mouth.

One additional insight that experience has provided regarding this change is that winning teams approach content as an asset rather than an obligation. Once you do this, it alters everything. You are able to invest the editorial effort needed to make your piece enduring and backed up by facts because it pays dividends over months and even years. Winning teams approach content as something to check off their list on a daily basis, and this results in a disposability that will surely drown them during the era of rapid and cheap content creation.