She let Gmail write me back and I could tell

I opened the email and smiled at all the nice compliments.

Then I realized that this person was dutifully restating every concept from my original email to her. You know, exactly how Gmail does it with those suggested responses.

It wasn’t rude or inaccurate, but I still felt fooled and, in a tiny way, betrayed because what I originally assumed was personal actually came from a click.

Now imagine how a journalist feels reviewing an unsolicited pitch from a stranger and their internal AI detector starts to trigger.

That’s why in the Inner Circle we use this mantra for pitching with AI: W-AI-T

W. Write the first draft yourself.

AI. Use AI in focused ways.

T. Tighten in your own voice.

In Karate Kid terms, this is where Daniel-san had to paint the fence over and over before Mr. Miyagi would teach him the crane kick. (Much thanks to Cobra Kai for reviving this reference.)

Here are two reasons it’s so important to W-AI-T.

Reason 1: AI-written pitches erode trust

Your own human writing can now trigger suspicion, so keep an eye out for these commonly accepted AI tells even if a chatbot never touched the pitch.

• A high density of em dashes
• Negative parallelism: “It’s not X, it’s Y”
• Signposts such as “Here’s the thing” and “Why this matters”
• Clusters of triads that force ideas into groups of three
• Strings of punchy fragments: “Cheap. Fast. Built for change.”

Each can appear in perfectly good human writing. The risk rises when they pile up so heavily that a journalist can practically smell the prompt through the screen.

They’re already skeptical of pitches in general; we don’t need to give them an extra reason to bail. (Yes, I just realized I purposely typed a semicolon there instead of the em dash I would have used in 2022.)

Reason 2: Your pitching muscles need reps

How will you even recognize good pitches from your AI tool if you’re not stretching your own capacity?

Off-the-shelf AI is average, and letting it draft first can anchor your thinking in mediocrity before your brain discovers a stronger direction. Write a human draft to establish the bar, then compare it with AI’s version and decide what actually improves the work.

Large corporate comms teams bring me in for pitching training. One of the most-cited reasons I hear from the VPs who engage me is a variation of:

We’ve outsourced so much pitching to agencies in recent years that our pitching muscles have atrophied.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to be hearing that reason soon, but with “AI” instead of “agencies.”

We covered these concepts in a private Inner Circle training earlier this week, and then we spent the rest of the time on the “Use AI in focused ways” part of W-AI-T.

Members got access to AI tools programmed to offer brainstorming boosts at specific steps of the pitching process.

Register for our Wait List and you can get access to this session and these new AI tools when we open up for new members.