By Bryce Quillin, PhD and Jessica Quillin, PhD
Co-Founders, It’s A Working Title LLC
Across industries, organisations are operating under the same economic pressures, using the same digital platforms, and adopting the same AI tools. Yet, they are achieving sharply divergent outcomes. Some continue to grow, sustain trust, and remain intelligible as they scale. Others are producing more content, investing more heavily in technology, and communicating more frequently, all while becoming harder to understand and easier to forget.
This widening gap cannot be explained by creativity, channel mix, content virality, or access to innovation. It reflects a deeper structural difference in how organisations organise, govern, and sustain meaning through content over time. In the AI era, advantage no longer accrues to those who can produce the most content or move the fastest. It accrues to those with systems capable of carrying narrative coherence across teams, channels, cultural avenues, and moments of change.
Content has quietly become a governing layer of organisational performance. The way an organisation structures and thinks about storytelling shapes how strategy is interpreted, how trust is built, and how identity holds under pressure. Where content operates as a coherent system with a defined underlying infrastructure to drive consistent content decision-making, organisations remain legible and differentiated. Where it does not, fragmentation accumulates and performance erodes.
Luxury provides a useful case study of this broader dynamic. Long regarded as a benchmark for disciplined storytelling, the sector historically relied on restraint, continuity, and symbolic depth to build meaning over time. Post-pandemic, the rapid acceleration of digital commerce compressed years of transformation into months. In response, even the most established brands adopted campaign-led, reactive content marketing tactics designed to compete for attention across platforms and markets. The result was not greater differentiation, but narrative fragmentation: too many messages, moving too quickly, with little connective tissue to tie them all together.
What luxury experienced early is now becoming visible across sectors. As organisations scale across regions and stakeholder groups, content expands faster than the systems required to hold it together. The problem is not volume itself, but the absence of structure and system-level thinking about content.
This pattern sits at the centre of IWT’s recent white paper, The Differentiation Economy: Why Narrative Systems Define Growth in the AI Era. Drawing on cross-sectoral analysis from our inaugural cross-sectoral IWT Content Effectiveness Index, our research shows that organisations with coherent content systems consistently outperform peers operating under the same economic and technological conditions. The difference lies in narrative architecture, governance, and operational discipline, not creative ambition or tool sophistication.
Unfortunately, the rise of AI has only intensified these dynamics. While often positioned as a solution to content overload, AI does not create true differentiation. Quite the reverse. It amplifies existing conditions. Where content systems are coherent, AI can build meaningful operational infrastructure for content, supporting consistency, reuse, and scale without dilution. Where systems are fragmented, AI accelerates volume without clarity and deepens sameness. The technology itself is not the differentiator. The system into which it is introduced is.
We are now operating in a “differentiation economy.” Growth no longer accrues evenly across sectors or categories. It belongs to organisations with structural narrative advantage whose stories can be consistently understood across moments of growth, pressure, and change. In today’s market, high-performing organisations need to communicate less, but with greater clarity. They invest in fewer, more durable stories rather than constant reinvention. Simplicity becomes a signal of confidence, not constraint.
AI has not changed what creates organisational differentiation. It has removed the margin for ambiguity. Meaning must be deliberately designed, actively governed, and consistently maintained or it will erode at speed.
Read the white paper, “The Differentiation Economy: Why Narrative Systems Define Growth in the AI Era”
This article is written by an FACC-NY member. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the French-American Chamber of Commerce – New York (FACC-NY).
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