As we segue’ into the last 2 months of the year, one of the things I most look forward to is reading everyone’s prediction posts. They really give me food for thought.
If I’m being honest, the one drawback of these forward-thinking pieces is that what is predicted just can’t happen in the window of 12 months; but that doesn’t mean that they won’t come to fruition. It’s just tough for it to happen in such a short amount of time. Now that we have level-set expectations, see if you can determine the two common themes throughout this post that will continuously collide and interact over and over again in the upcoming year.
With that being said, here are my 10 predictions for 2027.
1. Brands, if they haven’t already, will start to recognize that authenticity wins in social media. Regardless of the platform, whoever has a real face and voice will own the competitive advantage next year and beyond. Hasn’t it always been like that though?
2. In 2027, the BS authenticity detector will spread beyond LinkedIn and across all major social platforms. So, the advantage will stop being about how frequent and polished your content looks, and will become more about who you are, your network, your street-cred, and your real face(s). Your POV will matter more in 2027. Sharpen it to be heard. Know that you and your content will be more scrutinized and vetted than ever before.
3. As the content supply keeps growing, our attention will wane and people will learn how to filter with surgical precision; and from late 2027 on, the market will stop rewarding prefab content at scale. Translation: Give us your dirty, uneven, typo-laden posts.
4. While the creator economy will split into authentic brands versus interchangeable noise, the enterprise will face credibility issues as AI-created social content permeates every channel. The winners will keep a brand voice unmistakably human across every touchpoint. It will be authenticity at scale.
The creator competitive advantage, however, will scale quickly but will fight the authenticity challenge at every turn; whereas the enterprise competitive advantage will take a bit longer to develop. So, crossover won’t be a shortcut either way. Enterprises will have to experiment more to find the proper content mix, which will take longer.
5. In 2027 the enterprise struggle will be real as social media will become a value game in which quality gets watered down and/or buried for the sake of speed. The content paradox of good, fast and cheap will become front and center. You can have possibly two, but you cannot have all three.
6. As AI adoption becomes even more mainstream (is that even possible?), socialized AI content will flow in from all corners of the universe. The masses will push back (they already have). Casual users will ignore the blowback because it’s still the new shiny thing, but eventually the sheen will wear off, and attention decay will make their noise self-limiting. AI created social content will be yelling into the void.
7. Like the early days of social media, before brands descended onto all of the platforms, real, authentic, voices were the standard. There will be a return to this. Our true, authentic voices will rise above the AI noise. People will become better at sniffing out AI-generated content and the platforms will self-correct.
8. LinkedIn will be stuck in a tug of war between AI content and humanized content; its algorithm will be pulled in multiple directions and often won’t know what to drop in the feed. Some AI content won’t be bad, but LinkedIn will sit between two kinds of creators. LinkedIn will have to pick a side in 2027.
9. In 2027, the tools, resources, and levers for detecting whether content is human-generated versus AI-generated will become more prevalent. Particularly in my world of Biotech, look for more instances of a watermark or some type of AI identifier on every piece of social content so detection will no longer be a manual task or a separate tool but a built-in layer on all content. The people will then have even more power in deciding what type of social media content they want to consume.
10. Next year, end-user pushback against AI-generated social content will turn into a behavior or a grassroots movement. People will stop following, stop clicking, and start demanding proof of a human behind the post. The proof will be the lack of eyeballs.
Were you able to figure out what I see as the confluence and the conflict of AI and social in 2027? I think the interesting point is that we, as social media content consumers, will always determine the type of content that we want to see. As social media creators, the struggle is never-ending in that what’s fun and useful to create doesn’t necessarily jibe with what users want or what they will click on. Notice that I did not mention AI? Once the dust settles with AI, users will still want their content. They will still go to their social platforms to read, create and consume content and life resumes. The primary difference? AI rides shotgun.
