In the quiet hours of the morning, before the meetings begin and the dashboards flicker to life, a strange ritual takes place. Somewhere, a salesperson opens ChatGPT, types in “cold email for CEO,” and watches as the machine spins out a polished message, clean, concise, even elegant.
They copy it.
They paste it.
They send it.
And then they wait…
You are not competing against other salespeople. You are competing against silence, against fatigue, against the chaos of an overloaded inbox. What survives that environment is not convenience, it’s conviction!
Karim Mokhtar
They wait for something that will never come: a reply, a reaction, a moment of recognition. But nothing happens. The silence is not a mistake, it is a response in itself. It is the sound of a discerning mind refusing to engage with something that clearly lacks soul.
You see, we have arrived at an era where it is no longer the content of the message alone that matters, but the trace of the writer’s will within it. And this is where many fall short. The issue is not that AI is being used. The issue is that it’s being obeyed without question.
There is a profound difference between using AI as a chisel in your hand, shaping the message with intention, and letting it carve for you while you close your eyes and call it craft. The former is mastery. The latter is negligence.
This negligence is rarely forgiven at the highest levels.
C-level executives, the very people many of us are trying to reach, are not naive. They are not passive. They are not strangers to technology. These are the architects of modern industries, often with backgrounds in engineering, science, finance, medicine, or law. They have spent decades fine-tuning their perception. They are trained to read between lines, to detect dissonance in tone, and to assess intention at a glance. If your email was written without presence, they will know. If you didn’t mean every word, they will feel it. If you let a machine speak on your behalf without correcting it, sharpening it, or shaping it, they will not respond.
And why should they?
Isn’t it an insult, really, to ask a person who built a hospital or scaled a technology company to invest time in your message when you yourself couldn’t be bothered to invest time writing it?
The assumption that a pasted message is enough, that it will be forgiven because “everyone is doing it”, is a mistake of modern arrogance. It’s the error of someone who misunderstands the nature of attention, especially in high-stakes industries. You are not competing against other salespeople. You are competing against silence, against fatigue, against the chaos of an overloaded inbox. What survives that environment is not convenience, it’s conviction!
Let me be clear: there is nothing wrong with using AI. Absolutely nothing. Use it. Use it all the time. Let it structure your thoughts. Let it save you time. But time saved is not effort saved. Time saved is space gained, to reflect, to improve, to inject yourself into the message. You are still responsible for the final form. You are still the author.
If you think a CEO in healthcare, where lives are on the line, is going to reply to an email that feels generic, you are mistaken. If you think a CTO in aerospace, a dean of a university, or the founder of a fintech firm will trust a voice that clearly doesn’t belong to the sender, then you have misunderstood your audience.
There is no algorithm that can replicate the weight of genuine care, no template that can replace the spark of tailored thought.
What you send out is a mirror of what you value. If your email says, “Here is something pre-made that I didn’t bother to edit,” then what the reader hears is, “You are not worth my effort.” That’s the message. And that’s why they never write back.
There is no salvation in automation if it comes at the expense of your voice. There is no respect earned by speed alone. The greatest sin a salesperson can commit in this age of synthetic communication is to become synthetic themselves.
So I ask you, when you write, do you write to be efficient, or do you write to be remembered?
Do not let the machine rob you of the most important currency in sales: authentic presence. If you must use AI, then wield it like a blade. Hone it. Challenge it. Disobey it. Only then will the words carry the shape of your mind, the weight of your intent.
Otherwise, you’re just sending noise. And in a world of noise, silence always wins!
