Your shareholder letter’s ChatGPT-like style, marked by a four-word phrase, is turning CEOs away.

(SeaPRwire) –   Should you encounter us employing the subsequent phrasing, rest assured it originated from a human who was merely fatigued that day: Experts contend that the sentence structure “it’s not X, it’s Y” serves as a classic indicator of AI-generated text, and its prevalence in corporate communications has surged, Barron’s recently reported.

For instance, “Our ship is not just on the horizon—it is coming in,” as stated by Citizens Financial Group in its 2025 shareholder letter, or “Engineering AI’s future is not just a software challenge, it’s a physics challenge,” as Synopsys’s CEO articulated during a December earnings call. Both companies disclosed to Barron’s that their corporate communications teams leverage AI assistance.

Across major U.S. corporations:

• Barron’s observed this phrasing in 208 documents last year, an increase from 100 in 2024 and 49 in 2023.
• Companies recently utilizing the phrase include Progressive, Royal Caribbean, Coca-Cola, Dollar Tree, Cisco, Accenture, Workday, McKinsey, Microsoft, and Schwab.

However…it is “no smoking gun for AI use,” an AI detection company informed TechCrunch. The phrase might simply be a characteristic of AI writing because it was already a common linguistic cliché. Schwab asserted to Barron’s that the quote identified from them was “100% human-generated.”

Regardless…studies demonstrate that this sentence structure can be counterproductive by causing our brains to concentrate on the incorrect element.—ML

This report was initially published by Morning Brew.