How Should Founders Navigate Thought Leadership in an Era of Artificial Perspectives?
As AI-generated content floods professional networks and platforms, authentic thought leadership becomes exponentially more valuable. Yet most founders are outsourcing the very work that could differentiate them.
We challenge the template-driven approach to founder personal brand development and executive positioning in today’s information landscape, revealing why genuine experience, contrarian perspectives, and cultural specificity create sustainable competitive advantages in an algorithmic information landscape.
The thought leadership landscape is experiencing a significant shift as AI-generated perspectives become increasingly prevalent. Scroll through LinkedIn and you'll notice a growing pattern: thought leadership that sounds increasingly similar, with shared observations about disruption, common insights about customer-centricity, and familiar talking points about scaling culture.
While these tools promise to amplify founder perspectives, they're inadvertently creating homogenisation precisely when authentic perspectives could provide the greatest competitive advantage for brands.
What's worth examining in Singapore's startup ecosystem is the rapid adoption of AI tools for thought leadership amplification as a reflexive response to the pressure for “visibility”.
Instead of leveraging their unique position as operators navigating real business challenges, they're competing on the same algorithmic playing field as content marketers, consultants, and AI systems.
Why AI Thought Leadership Fails
More and more founders treat thought leadership like a form of content marketing—systematic, scalable, and optimised for engagement metrics rather than the sharing of genuine insights—following templates, using AI writing assistants, and optimising for likes and shares rather than meaningful stakeholder engagement.
This AI-driven approach creates three fundamental problems that make thought leadership ineffective in an AI-saturated environment.
First, it eliminates the contrarian insights that make founder perspectives valuable. When founders use AI tools to "optimise" their thoughts for broader appeal, they unwittingly remove the unconventional takes and hard-earned lessons from making genuine mistakes that make their perspective unique.
As industry experts observe, this creates a flood of "thought leaders lite"—founders armed with surface-level knowledge but lacking true depth—who can produce professional-looking content while genuine operators struggle to stand out amid the algorithmic noise.
The result? Thought leadership that sounds like every other perfectly polished piece of content flooding platforms.
Secondly, AI-written thought leadership removes the operational context that makes founder insights credible. Founders and executives who feed their real experiences into AI tools will see that what comes out are perfectly polished articles that sound like they could have been written by a McKinsey consultant who's never operated a startup in Southeast Asia.
It strips founder perspectives of the emotional rollercoaster of regulatory delays, the frustration of cultural misunderstandings, and the specific timeline pressures that shaped their decisions.
Most importantly, the pursuit of viral founder content transforms thought leadership from strategic communication to opportunistic marketing. Founders begin crafting opinions designed to generate engagement rather than sharing insights that reflect genuine learning from building companies.
Increasingly, sophisticated audiences cannot distinguish between a thought leader with firsthand experience and an algorithm “repackaging internet knowledge”, and that is bad news for everyone. Over time, this will likely erode trust and undermine credibility in the entire ecosystem of thought leadership—precisely when authentic perspectives could provide brand differentiation.
How to build authentic thought leadership
The answer lies in embracing exactly what artificial intelligence cannot replicate: personal conviction developed through years of operational experience, contrarian insights that emerge from navigating unique business challenges, cultural understanding that comes from building companies within specific market contexts, and most critically, the single edge that humans will always have over non-sentient intelligence—empathy.
Be a human—show empathy
Singapore's startup ecosystem is small enough that everyone knows everyone, but diverse enough that each founder's journey hits different cultural and operational challenges. The founders who build genuine followings aren't the ones with perfect success stories, but the the ones who acknowledge the universal struggles whilst sharing their specific solutions.
What keeps you up at night? What was your costliest lesson? What was your lowest point, and what did you do about it? Think about what would resonate with you when you were a fresh entrepreneur. That kind of rawness takes empathy for founders and the human condition, and will never be replaced by non-sentient intelligence.
you’re more original than you think—embrace it
So many founders we’ve spoken to have a tendency to slip into creative anxiety when confronting originality, with the most common refrain being, “Whatever I have to say has already been said a thousand times and better,” preferring to let their work do the talking.
As communications partners to founders and C-suites, we completely understand why they’d end up with this form of insecurity. Founders and business leaders are in the business of constant self-improvement and optimisation, and one of the tried and tested ways of achieving this is to constantly surround yourself with people better than you.
After a decade of learning from the best, it’s not surprising to us that many founders develop the notion that they have little to offer in terms of perspective and original thought.
And that couldn’t be further from the truth. Most founders we’ve worked with almost always bring their particular experiences, unique values, and interpretation of them into their management philosophy and company culture, shaping the outcomes around them through the embodiment of a worldview that is truly unique to them.
For founders who struggle with originality, ask yourself how you got to where you are. Interrogate the decisions you’ve had to make to get here, and ask yourself why you made them the way you did.
From our experience, founders who do this eventually realise that only they could have done what they did, accepting that they possess unique experiences and learnings that have accumulated over the years that may have been buried in their relentless pursuit of growth.
A byproduct of embracing originality is the fabled authenticity, which also serves as a defining differentiator in today’s business and information landscape.
transparency as a policy
Never take your audience for granted, and always choose to be transparent in your sharing of business and subject matter expertise. The truth is that people really do not expect anyone, with the possible exception of the Queen, to be perfect, least of all a founder constantly fighting against headwinds.
Acknowledging that means understanding that people really want to hear what you struggle with and the mistakes you’ve made, and being transparent about them as opposed to putting on a front of invincibility is what’s going to get you respect.
be the signal, not the noise
Don’t let the vast amounts of content out there fool you—depth still beats breadth, and thought leadership isn’t a volume game. Avoid saturating your own brand by competing with the noise, and instead aim to be the signal.
The best thought leaders we know treat thought leadership as a long and slow game, and their audience as followers to be nurtured, not statistics for engagement.
understand media and mediums
Singapore's media landscape offers diverse opportunities for founders who understand how to use different formats strategically. The most successful thought leaders we know don't just write LinkedIn posts—they appear on regional business podcasts, contribute to policy discussions, and use multimedia to tell stories that reinforce their strategic insights across multiple touchpoints.
Expand beyond written long-form content to include media interviews, videos, podcasts, and dynamic content.
Engage a competent communications and PR agency for media training across various formats and contexts, and master the ability to deliver your company’s key messages across contexts and cultures. Different formats can reach broader audiences across ASEAN and global markets and cater to various cultural preferences and business communication styles.
While the cost of media training may appear prohibitive for some, from our experience, the benefits of excellent media training follow an executive throughout their career, and should be evaluated in that light.
mediums for thought leadership for startup founders
Good thought leadership programs are highly tailored to the thought leader’s persona, objectives, and industry. While it may feel intuitive to simply follow in the footsteps of a key opinion leader (KOL) whom you deeply admire, it’s almost always never good advice to blindly chase a Bloomberg TV appearance or a keynote on the largest stage at the Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF) right off the bat.
Thought leadership is typically a long and calculated journey that requires careful consideration of your audience profiles, relevant industry narratives, and the narrative territories that your brand should own given your business goals.
Typically, fresh founders and business leaders will have to build up their domain authority in the public sphere through a series of smaller opportunities before arriving at that major appearance or opportunity.
This is because the larger the media outlet or publication platform, the more options for KOLs they have to choose from, and, naturally, the higher the bar. Establishing your thought presence across smaller publications and formats gradually will provide the CNBCs and Bloombergs of the world with material on which to assess your knowledge capital and presence as a leader.
Broadly speaking, there are various formats that are suitable for startup founders and business leaders with limited budget and bandwidth.
Earned media (Interviews & COmmentaries)
Media interviews secured from media pitching and narrative development
Media commentary secured from media pitching or inbound media requests
Interviews secured from the distribution of a press announcement or company memo
Podcast interviews
Video interviews on alternative media channels (YouTube, Spotify)
Paid media & Editorials
Media interviews and editorial features that you pay media publications for
Paid podcast or alternative media appearances
Sponsored KOL content on alternative media platforms (YouTube, Spotify)
Owned & Branded content
Articles and blog posts
Research reports and whitepapers
Insights and data-driven content
Corporate, branded, or thematic videos
Social media
LinkedIn posts
Facebook and Instagram content
Events & Speaking Engagements
Speaking engagement or panel discussions at events and conferences
Public keynotes and speeches
Industry presentations and sharing
Webinars and workshops
Intellectual Property
Publishing a book or series of thematic essays
Peer-reviewed academic research