The ‘Unlock’ Trap: Why AI Is Making Your Executive Team Sound Like Bots
Fast Company March 29, 2026
Professional communication is facing a crisis of authenticity as leaders inadvertently adopt the linguistic quirks of LLMs, from repetitive sentence starters to clinical structures. For executives, this 'bot-speak' represents a hidden reputational risk, as audiences increasingly tune out content that feels processed rather than personal.
Key Intelligence
•Apparently, speech coaches are now identifying 'AI-isms'—specific words like 'Unlock' or 'The truth is'—that immediately flag a script as machine-generated.
•Did you hear that we’re starting to apply 'prompting' logic to humans, becoming less patient with conversational nuance and expecting immediate, structured output?
•One keynote speaker recently had to be coached out of her script because she sounded like a bot, inadvertently using the specific vocabulary of a training dataset.
•Experts are warning about the 'homogenization of thought,' where unique leadership voices are flattened into the generic middle-ground of AI-generated text.
•The 'so what' for the C-suite: if your audience can hear the AI in your delivery, you lose the trust and texture required for high-stakes persuasion.
•The phenomenon suggests that while AI saves time on the first draft, it requires a human 'soul' pass to avoid looking like a low-effort hallucination.