Your professional services brand isn’t human and it never will be, but it still has an identity that needs to reflect and communicate the values of your business and the people in the business.  Your business identity signals the collective authority, experience, and expertise of the professionals who work there.

We don’t perceive a brand’s tone of voice as fraudulent because we believe that it has been created by people who we know to be trustworthy. But trust requires consistency, so when there is a blip in that consistency – however subtle it might be – it doesn’t just affect tone, it affects trust.

So, how do we maintain a consistent tone of voice and avoid identity fraud when we integrate AI in our marketing?

 

Start with a TOV document

Most mid-to-large firms have brand guidelines, but few have a tone of voice document. You might believe that your brand identity is obvious to everyone in the business, or that your marketing activities don’t require a detailed tone of voice framework. Not so long ago you would be forgiven for thinking this, but that in the AI-enabled marketing functions of today, that model doesn’t hold.

If AI is contributing to content creation and marketing activation, there’s a risk that AI will become the dominant ‘voice’ instead of the brand it represents. Even smaller businesses should take the time to create a simple brand tone of voice document that can be used by inhouse marketers, agency partners and AI tools.

In it’s simplest form, your framework should include a clear description of your brand tone – more than just ‘professional’ or ‘friendly’ – that can be understood by every person in the business regardless of role. It should be supported with examples, relative to different roles, making it relevant and applicable to all. It should be explicit in language to use and avoid, including abbreviations and colloquialisms of your brand name.

In partnership-led firms, this is no longer a nice to have. If your senior leaders shape or create content, AI can either reduce inconsistency or amplify it. The difference lies in how clearly you define your identity and tone of voice – and use it!

 

Train everyone, even your AI

Guidelines are great, but if they’re written just to be put in a folder and ignored, they’re neither use nor ornament. Remember that we’re aiming for brand consistency, and that requires capability. That means training marketers and non-marketers who contribute to content and thought leadership, it means embedding your tone of voice guidance into proposal writing and pitch documents, and it means integrating your framework with your chosen AI tools.

Training should go beyond what and why, to how. Include exercises to test writing in the tone of voice across multiple formats, including blog posts, press releases and social media captions for marketers, job descriptions and vacancy listings for HR, proposals and pitch docs for anyone involved in business development, and more. If your brand is to show up consistently, your colleagues should feel confident in their communications.

When it comes to using AI, prompting the chosen tool with your brand tone of voice framework is extremely important. AI reflects the specificity of the instructions given, so loose phrasing won’t suffice. Don’t allow AI to make assumptions, it’s better to give more details than fewer. Providing prompts for difference use cases in your firm will ensure consistency across departments and therefore across AI-created comms.

 

Use AI as a partner not a producer

For professional service brands leaning more heavily on AI as a marketing tool, remember to treat it like a partner not a producer or publisher. Content should remain human-led, AI-enhanced, and human-approved.

Just as marketers have defined skills and specialisms, so too do AI tools, so start by defining the role of AI in your marketing process and choose the right tool for the job based on where AI sits in the workflow, what types of content it will support, the level of human v AI input required, and the nature of the content being co-created (i.e. be mindful that open AIs will not protect sensitive or personal data so a closed tool might be needed depending on your profession).

If you’re a professional services business with limited marketing resources, my favourite tool to recommend for content creation is Claude, which allows you to define and store your brand tone of voice ready to be applied to writing. It’s what I use to check or challenge content to ensure what I’ve written is the best it can be. In my opinion, content should be written by a human, enhanced by AI, and edited by a human. Like a sandwich.

 

AI adoption in marketing is no longer experimental, it’s operational, which means brand governance is a leadership issue. The role of leadership in professional service firms therefore involves ensuring that AI strengthens brand identity, rather than diluting it. Your brand may not have a Mum to stop the conversation when something feels off, but it does have a client base that can spot the signs and simply disengage.