Some days I worry about how little human thought appears to go into what our profession now calls thought leadership.

Scroll through LinkedIn and you will see what I mean. My feed fills with polished infographics promising to explain complex issues in five easy steps. Five ways to audit AI. Seven risks every CAE should know. Ten questions every audit committee should ask. Many look impressive. Some contain useful information. I suspect AI produced a large share of them.

I am not opposed to using AI when creating thoughtful articles. I use AI tools myself, for research, for testing ideas, for editing, for feature images. AI can make you more efficient. It can sharpen your thinking and help you say what you mean more clearly. Used well, it makes human thought leadership better.

But one question keeps coming back to me: where do you draw the line between using AI to enhance thought leadership and using it to manufacture thought leadership?

Consider a simple test. You open an AI tool and type: “Create an infographic depicting the greatest sources of pressure on internal audit independence.” Within seconds it identifies management interference, budget constraints, restricted access, reporting relationships, scope limitations, and fear of retaliation. It organizes these into a framework and builds a polished graphic. You post it on LinkedIn under your name.

Did you create thought leadership? I am not sure much was created that was thoughtful or leading.

Thought Leadership Requires Thought

Before generative AI, producing substantive professional content took real effort. You researched. You reflected on your own experience. You built a hypothesis, tested it against conventional wisdom, and revised your argument. That process did not guarantee quality, but it required something from you.

AI has erased that barrier. Today almost anyone can generate an authoritative-sounding article, framework, or infographic in minutes, and it can look as professional as something that took a veteran practitioner days to write before ready access to AI tools.

That creates a real challenge for our profession. You have to learn to tell content creation apart from thought leadership.

The distinction matters because thought leadership should move our collective understanding forward. It should introduce an idea, challenge an assumption, connect issues nobody has connected, or offer a perspective grounded in real experience and judgment. Repackaging conventional wisdom into an attractive graphic does not meet that bar, no matter how many likes it earns.

The “Beacon Awards” Are Forcing Me to Confront This

This question has become personal as I prepare for the annual Internal Audit Beacon Awards, which recognize the thought leadership that has illuminated a path forward for our profession. AI complicates the judging.

Should judges try to determine whether AI was used? I don’t think so. The better question is whether meaningful human intellectual contribution stands behind the work.

After a lot of reflection, and some help from AI, I landed on seven principles for judging genuine thought leadership in this era.

• The idea should originate with the author. AI can research, challenge, organize, edit, and illustrate. The central insight has to be yours.
• AI should amplify expertise, not manufacture it. A useful AI-generated summary is still just content. Usefulness alone does not make it thought leadership.
• Originality should matter more than polish. A plain 500-word piece with one genuinely new idea beats a spectacular infographic recycling arguments that have circulated for years.
• Human judgment should be evident. Experience, professional skepticism, context, curiosity, and a willingness to challenge assumptions are what set real thought leadership apart.
• Authors must remain accountable. If your name is on it, you own it. You cannot blame AI for a bad statistic, a fabricated citation, or a flawed recommendation.
• Material AI involvement should be transparent. You don’t need to disclose that AI fixed your grammar or built your feature image. If AI substantially generated your ideas, analysis, or content, say so.
• You should be able to defend the work without AI. This is my favorite test. Why do you believe this? What evidence supports it? What is original here? What experience shaped your thinking? If you cannot answer those questions, you are probably looking at content, not thought leadership.

AI Isn’t the Enemy of Thought Leadership

Human thought leadership is not doomed. But genuinely original thinking is going to get harder to spot amid the volume of AI-generated content flooding our feeds. The answer is not to reject AI. Internal auditors should learn to use it aggressively and responsibly. But you should never mistake the ability to generate content for the ability to generate insight.

As I think through this year’s Beacon Awards, I keep returning to one principle: AI can enhance thought leadership. It should never substitute for thought. That is where I am drawing the line. I am still thinking about it, which feels right for a piece about thought leadership.

I welcome your thoughts.