AI has slipped into small businesses like a bad habit.

It starts innocently enough. A quick email drafted in seconds. A proposal cleaned up to sound ‘more professional’. A client update that’s technically correct but strangely hollow.

Efficient? Sure. Harmless? Not even close.

AI has raised the baseline for written communication. That’s the upside. The downside is that everything (and everyone) is starting to sound… the same. Familiar rhythms, generic phrasing – and messages that say everything right, yet nothing at all. Your clients might not call it out. But they do hesitate and start to wonder whether the person behind the message actually understands their business, or just knows how to prompt a machine.

A 2025 University of Florida study of 1,100 professionals found that while AI makes written communication more polished, heavy reliance on it damages trust significantly – both internally and externally. When supervisors used high levels of AI to communicate, fewer than half of employees viewed them as sincere and credible.

But overreliance on AI doesn’t only erode trust gradually. Sometimes the damage is sudden, public – and very hard to recover from.

In 2025, Deloitte submitted a 237-page report to the Australian Federal Government on a $440,000 contract. The report contained fabricated academic references, invented footnotes, and a quote falsely attributed to a Federal Court judge.

When sprung, Deloitte refunded part of the fee and maintained that the corrections didn’t affect the underlying recommendations. Perhaps. But one of the world’s most trusted consulting brands – built entirely on the promise of rigorous, verified expertise – got caught outsourcing its judgment to a machine. And once that trust is dented, everything that follows is viewed with doubt.

That’s the context every business is now operating in. Your clients are seeing the same headlines as you. So when they see a brand like Deloitte cutting corners with AI, they’ll naturally start to question whether your business is too.

And the numbers bear that out.

A University of Melbourne and KPMG study of 48,000 people across 47 countries found that while two-thirds now use AI regularly, fewer than half are willing to trust AI systems. That gap – between use and trust – is where client relationships are won or lost.

So why is this happening? Why are smart, capable professionals handing their business writing to a machine?

For most, it comes down to confidence. Business writing feels exposing in a way that other work doesn’t. A financial model is either right or wrong. But a piece of writing is a judgment call – about tone, about what to include, about how direct to be – and that ambiguity makes a lot of people deeply uncomfortable. AI removes the discomfort instantly. It produces something that looks competent and professional in seconds, which is enormously appealing when you’re not sure your own words will measure up.

The good news is that the fix doesn’t require abandoning AI. But it does require setting clear standards and expectations around how your team uses it.

Encourage them to use it to get words on the page when they’re staring at a blank screen, to tighten a sentence that isn’t working, or to check their tone before hitting send. AI earns its keep in the editing chair, not the author’s seat. The thinking has to come from them first – and their judgment has to run through every word before it leaves the building.

Facts must also always be verified. AI will state something confidently and be completely wrong. And it’s your business’s name on that proposal or report, not the machine’s.

But setting that standard only works if your staff have the confidence to back themselves without it. If they’re leaning on AI because they don’t trust their own writing, they won’t suddenly find confidence because you’ve told them to use AI less. They’ll just find better ways to hide it. Investing in their writing skills is the most direct way to reduce dependency, because once someone trusts their own ability, they stop needing a machine to compensate.

AI is now part of how writing gets done in the workplace. There’s no winding that back. But the businesses that come through this change with their client relationships intact will be the ones that keep human skill and judgement at the centre of the work – and refuse to let shortcuts come at the expense of trust.

Now it’s over to you: Is overreliance on AI writing already a bad habit in your workplace?

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