The business case for telling the truth

As artificial intelligence makes polished corporate messaging easier to produce, Bryan Adams argues that companies may find greater advantage in something rather less sophisticated: being believable.

Artificial intelligence can now produce a careers page, corporate statement or recruitment campaign in seconds. The more difficult task is persuading anyone to believe it.

That is the argument at the centre of Sell The Truth, a new book by employer branding specialist Bryan Adams, published today. Rather than treating honesty as a worthy corporate virtue, Adams makes a more commercial case: in a world awash with increasingly polished content, credibility itself is becoming valuable.

It is a timely argument. Companies have spent years refining the language used to attract employees, often through carefully constructed statements about culture, purpose and values. Yet prospective employees have access to considerably more information than they once did. Employer reviews, social media and professional networks make it easier to compare what an organisation says about itself with what working there is actually like.

AI adds another complication. If every company can produce competent, carefully worded corporate material at scale, polish alone becomes less useful as a means of differentiation.

Adams, founder and chief executive of careers platform Happydance and previously founder of employer brand agency Ph.Creative, argues that organisations should instead build their communications around evidence of what their culture actually looks like. His framework, which he calls the “Truth Cascade”, proposes that truth produces clarity, which influences culture, capability and ultimately commercial performance.

When a story says more than a slogan

One example comes from Adams's consultancy work with Virgin Media. An engineer discovered that an elderly customer faced spending Christmas alone with a broken television and bought him a replacement with his own money. Virgin Media subsequently turned the episode into a short film.

For Adams, the significance was not simply that it made a touching story. It demonstrated the sort of behaviour the company wanted its culture to encourage without having to declare that its employees were compassionate or customer focused.

That distinction sits at the heart of the book. Corporate values are easy to write down. Evidence that those values survive contact with the everyday realities of a business is rather harder to manufacture.

“Truth isn’t soft. It’s the hardest commercial advantage to copy,” Adams says, arguing that authentic human stories will become increasingly important as AI assumes a greater role in corporate communication.

There is an obvious irony here. Adams himself runs an AI powered careers technology company. His argument, however, is not necessarily that businesses should reject the technology. It is that technology cannot supply the underlying culture from which credible stories emerge.

That may prove increasingly important in recruitment. Generative AI has dramatically lowered the cost of producing words and images that sound professional. It has not lowered the cost of building an organisation whose employees and customers recognise the picture being presented to them.

For business leaders, that makes the central proposition of Sell The Truth deceptively simple. The competitive advantage may no longer lie in finding a better way to describe the company you would like to be, but in finding better evidence of the company you already are.

Sell The Truth: Leadership Storytelling For All Cultures That Win by Bryan Adams is published by LID Publishing today, priced at £19.99.