Positioning is for humans

Positioning is the one decision in your business you cannot hand to AI.

You can use AI for almost everything else in lead gen. Research, drafting, analysis, the admin that eats your week. But the decision about what you stand for, and who you're for, has to come from a human. Here's why.

AI gravitates to the mean, and powerful positioning is the opposite

Ask ChatGPT for a positioning statement and it will give you one instantly. It will read well. It won't have any typos.

It will also be average. That's not a flaw in the tool, it's how the tool works. A large language model predicts the most likely next word. It's built to land in the middle of everything it has seen. The average of everyone is exactly where you don't want to be.

Positioning is about being different. It's about finding the one thing that sets you apart and saying it out loud, when everyone else is blending in. You cannot get to distinctive by asking a machine for the most probable answer.

Good positioning is about taking a risk AI won't take for you

Strong positioning means standing for something, which means standing against something else.

If you're positioned this way, you're not positioned that way. You're telling a whole set of potential clients that you are not for them, even the ones who would happily pay you. That takes nerve. It feels like turning down money. Because sometimes it is.

AI will not take that risk for you. It has no skin in your business. It doesn't feel the fear of narrowing down, or the pull to keep every door open just in case. It will hedge, because hedging is safe, and safe is average. The willingness to commit, and to lose the wrong clients on purpose, is a human act.

It's a decision for one person, not a committee

People think positioning is a marketing job. They hand it to the marketing team and ask for a statement.

It isn't a marketing job. It's a decision about what your business does and who it sells to. That belongs to the leader. To you.

And the more people you put in the room, the worse it gets. Everyone protects their corner. The edges soften. You end up with something that offends nobody and appeals to nobody. Positioning done by committee is positioning watered down to nothing. It needs one person with the authority to choose, and the conviction to hold the line.

Where AI does help

None of this means AI has no place in the work. It has a real one, just not the deciding part.

AI is excellent for the research underneath the decision. Finding where your audience gathers, what they read, the words they use for their problem. It's useful for drafting, once you've decided, turning your positioning into a homepage, a bio, a pitch. And it's a sharp sparring partner. Ask it to argue against your positioning, poke holes in it, tell you who you're alienating. That pressure-tests the decision without making it for you.

Use AI for the legwork and the stress-testing. Make the decision yourself.

That's the whole point. Positioning is a place in your lead gen where being human is the advantage, not the limitation (my position is that being a human is always an advantage - but others disagree).

If you want a structured way to make that decision, my mini course, Position your business for leads, walks you through the whole process: your best customer, your positioning, and an offer that's hard to say no to. £29, and you can start now.

By Heather Baker, founder of the AI Edit: we help B2B businesses find more customers (that’s our positioning statement)