If you ever catch us using the following phrasing, trust that it was written by a human who was just tired that day: Experts say the sentence structure “it’s not X, it’s Y” is a classic indicator of AI-generated writing, and its usage in corporate communications has spiked, Barron’s recently reported.
For example, “Our ship is not just on the horizon—it is coming in,” as Citizens Financial Group said in its 2025 shareholder letter, or “Engineering AI’s future is not just a software challenge, it’s a physics challenge,” as Synopsys’s CEO said on a December earnings call. Both companies told Barron’s that their corporate communications teams use AI assistance.
Across large US companies:
- Barron’s spotted this phrasing in 208 documents last year, up from 100 in 2024 and 49 in 2023.
- Companies using the phrase of late include Progressive, Royal Caribbean, Coca-Cola, Dollar Tree, Cisco, Accenture, Workday, McKinsey, Microsoft, and Schwab.
But…it’s “no smoking gun for AI use,” an AI detection company told TechCrunch. The phrase may simply be a hallmark of AI writing because it was already such a linguistic cliché. Schwab told Barron’s that the quote it identified was “100% human-generated.”
Regardless…studies show that this sentence structure can backfire by causing our brains to focus on the wrong thing.—ML
This report was originally published by Morning Brew.
