By Shaina Mishkin

There's a familiar ring these days across company conference calls, shareholder letters, news releases, and other corporate communications.

"Our purpose is not just a statement; it's a guiding principle that shapes everything we do," insurer Progressive wrote in its 2025 letter to shareholders.

At Citizens Financial Group, the growth in its private banking franchise is "not just a win for the private bank -- it's a win for the entire enterprise.

On a December earnings call, Synopsys' CEO said that "engineering AI's future is not just a software challenge, it's a physics challenge."

And there's an echo from your financial advisor. "Independence is not just a business model -- it's a mind-set," Jon Beatty, head of Schwab Advisor Services, said in a September press release.

The phrasing is increasingly common and it's a hallmark of chabots, experts say.

"The sentence construction 'it's not X, it's Y' is one of the biggest tells in AI," says Jeff Gaunt, founder of Gaunt Strategies, a firm that specializes in crisis communications, media training, and integrating AI into corporate communications.

After noticing similar phrasing in news releases and other corporate communications, Barron's scanned AlphaSense's library of company documents such as news releases, Securities and Exchange Commission filings, and earnings call transcripts.

The results show an intense ramp-up of the sentence structure in 2024, following just a handful of mentions in the previous two decades. The phrasing hit its zenith in the second half of 2025, with AlphaSense logging 73 documents in the final quarter.

Citizens, in response to a Barron's query about its use of AI in communications, said the company is building generative AI into its workflows across the bank, a process that is expected to last years. Its corporate communications team is "an early adopter and leverages the technology in a number of areas including copy-editing and proofreading, complementing rigorous team member reviews."

A Synopsys spokesperson said that "Synopsys' corporate communications, including prepared remarks for earnings, are human led with AI assistance for clarity and brevity...Regardless of whether AI assisted with this sentence, it's an accurate and well-made point."

I decided to see how ChatGPT would craft a corporate message for me, so I asked it to generate a press release emphasizing the importance of human writing for an imaginary communications professional: "Writing is more than just assembling words -- it reflects critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and lived experience."

If the bot is fond of the phrasing, it's because humans are, too. In a statement to Barron's, a Schwab spokesperson said the company is "exploring various ways to use AI responsibly and effectively across our firm, but this quote you are citing was 100% human generated."

Progressive said its annual shareholder "was not generated by AI. Of course, like many other companies we are leveraging AI for some content creation, such as brainstorming, editing and proofreading of various communications."

How to detect AI-composed text -- and whether humans or software can tell the difference -- is a subject of academic debate. AI detectors, for example, have a tendency to erroneously flag essays written by speakers of English as a second language, a 2023 Stanford analysis found.

But, as house hunters, clothing shoppers, and investors increasingly bring AI along for the ride, so do communicators. Three quarters of public relations pros surveyed by Muck Rack say they use AI on the job, with editing and writing among the most frequent uses and greatest timesavers.

No matter the source, the phrasing has staying power. Usage continues from every corner of industry, AlphaSense results show. At cruise operator Royal Caribbean Group: "Disruptive technology is not just a tool," CEO Jason Liberty said in prepared remarks on the company's January conference call. "It's a capability that we have been building for more than five years." The company didn't respond to a request for comment.

At water heater manufacturer A.O. Smith: "Sustainability is not just a goal," CEO Stephen M. Shafer says in a quote on the company's website. "It's a core part of who we are and what we do every day."

Whether the phrasing stems from humans or robots, the "not X, buy Y" construct is all over the place.

Coca-Cola and Dollar Tree, which have also used the structure, didn't respond to requests for comment.

There's a healthy place for AI in business communications, Gaunt says: crisis communicators can use it as a "devil's advocate" when evaluating approaches or stress-testing strategies. It can serve as a place to brainstorm or even draft an early version of a press release "as long as there is a significant, significant editing process," he says.

But communicators should avoid outsourcing too much thinking to the tools. "Good public relations is built on trust and it's built on relationships, and the concern is when the industry leans too hard into tools that they can use as a shortcut or a crutch," he says. "AI has tremendous benefits for the industry, and there are ways to use AI responsibly and appropriately, but it can't be a substitute for good thinking and it can't be a substitute for good relationship building."

As one might say: this isn't just a one-off occurrence across a small handful of companies -- it's an evolution in the way people are communicating in the age of AI.

Write to Shaina Mishkin at shaina.mishkin@dowjones.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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April 17, 2026 10:01 ET (14:01 GMT)

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