Byline: Death to AI Slop
Selected for Google Labs' BAGEL 2026 LLM builder conference (the only marketer among 16 poster sessions).
The problem: Executive posts only work when they sound like the leader and say something they actually believe. Ask a general-purpose AI to write from a bare topic and it fills the gaps itself: generic frameworks, invented anecdotes, and stock phrasing readers spot immediately.
What I built: Byline helps executive comms pros prepare and refine drafts. It doesn't replace their judgment. It interviews the leader to build a bank of their own stories and opinions, word for word, and flags timely news in their lane. From there, people make the calls: the comms lead picks the topic and the story that fits it, Byline prepares two drafts on two different models, the leader picks the one that sounds most like them without knowing which model wrote it, and the comms lead refines it from there. It screens out 65+ AI writing tells along the way, and nothing posts without the leader's approval.
The bitter lesson: I originally engineered a 50-call multi-stage tournament and editing assembly line. When I ran an 8-topic blind evaluation against a single-pass prompt fed the leader's raw spoken story and three past writing samples, the simple version won 6 of 8 rounds and the complex pipeline won zero. More AI steps polished the soul out of the prose. The leader's real stories, and the people who know them, did the heavy lifting.
