The SAB Foundation Tholoana Programme personal transformation workshop always ends with a case study that calls for entrepreneurs to work together to craft and present a business case for investment.

It’s a fun event that tests participants’ skills in teamwork, strategic thinking, marketing, financial modelling and brand positioning.

This year, the focus was water solutions – a topical subject in many parts of the world. Participants came up with innovative solutions, detailed arguments, professional logos and slick presentations.

The teams crafted entire business models in a matter of hours, which last year would have taken days. The quality of the presentations was a 10x improvement over years past… with evidence of AI on every slide.

But the winning presentation wasn’t the one that rested on the laurels of clever AI strategies. It was the presentation that was built on the lived experiences of the team and presented in a simple, authentic voice. It was the human voice that stood out.

As business growth specialists, we receive thousands of AI-generated proposals – each one more impressive, detailed and professional than the last. The same is true for job applicants – CVs that make the most average candidate look like a gold medal winner. The challenge we now have is to sift out the real story, the real potential behind the hype.

AI has upped the pass mark, and now everyone has a chance to move into a category called “AI Average”. It is changing the rules as true success now demands that we go beyond this to build stories, brands and proposals that shed the cloak of artificial excellence and stand out as authentic, different and ‘made by humans’.

When AI learns to do this, we will need different tools to sift fact from fiction.