A Flood of Content, a Drought of Experience

Over the past year or so there’s been a noticeable shift in how consultants in the gaming industry are positioning themselves. Everyone is publishing. Constantly. Articles, white papers, opinion pieces, frameworks with arrows and clean diagrams. On the surface it looks like a sudden intellectual surge across the sector. In reality, a large share of it is AI-assisted output — and often not very well disguised.

You can spot it quickly.
The tone is polished but generic.
The arguments are technically correct but strangely hollow.
The conclusions arrive without friction.

Everything reads like a competent summary of things we all already know, arranged into something that looks substantial until you realize there’s no lived experience behind it. No floor reality. No data from an actual operation. No scars. Just a steady stream of cleanly packaged “insights.”

We’ve reached a point where producing content is easier than having something to say.
A remarkable productivity breakthrough.

Synthetic expertise at scale

Consultants have always used content to position themselves. Publishing is not new. What’s new is the volume and the speed. Someone who used to write two thoughtful pieces a year can now publish two a week. Some appear to publish two before their second coffee. A few are on a pace that would make a newsroom uncomfortable.

The logic is straightforward:
Visibility creates perceived authority.
Frequency feeds the algorithm.
The algorithm feeds invitations.

So the feeds fill up. LinkedIn becomes a conveyor belt of “thought leadership.” It all sounds right. It uses the correct language. It references familiar trends — AI, omnichannel, player journey, loyalty optimization. Nothing in it is technically wrong. But very little of it is rooted in actual operational decision-making.

It’s the professional equivalent of instant coffee. Perfectly drinkable. Widely available. No one writes home about it.

The collateral damage

This content flood doesn’t just dilute attention. It distorts the perception of expertise in the market.

Consultants who spend their time actually working with operators — on floors, in boardrooms, inside messy real-world decisions — don’t always have the time or inclination to publish constantly. They write when they have something to say, not because an algorithm expects a weekly contribution. That used to be normal. Now it can look like a suspicious lack of “presence.”

Meanwhile, those who master the cadence of AI-assisted publishing can appear omnipresent. Their names circulate. Their posts trend. Before long, the industry starts to confuse output with experience.

This has consequences.
Serious operators and consultants get crowded out of the conversation.
Clients see the same names repeatedly and assume they represent the leading edge.
Conference organizers scan engagement metrics and invite whoever appears most “relevant.”

The result is a tidy feedback loop: content creates visibility, visibility creates speaking slots, speaking slots reinforce perceived authority, and perceived authority justifies more content. Whether the underlying insight is deep or superficial becomes a secondary detail. If the engagement numbers look healthy, the bio writes itself.

It’s efficient. Slightly surreal. But efficient.

For consultants who rely on reputation built over decades, this shift is not harmless. It changes how credibility is assessed. It rewards activity over substance. It makes it harder to distinguish between people who’ve run operations and people who’ve learned to run prompts. One of those groups is easier to scale.

A personal observation

I’ll admit I was genuinely surprised by how quickly this took hold. Some of the people producing this constant stream of articles are otherwise very respectable industry figures. People who have done real work, built real operations, made real decisions. Yet their feeds now read like automated knowledge factories.

Even more surprising is how effective it can be. Publish enough, and the algorithms start to cooperate. Engagement climbs. Visibility increases. Before long, those same voices are on conference stages, moderating panels, presenting “industry insights” — often built on content that feels suspiciously frictionless.

We’ve arrived at a point where an engagement rate can quietly substitute for a track record.
It saves everyone time.

To be clear, I’m not anti-tool. Used properly, AI can help structure ideas, summarize information, speed up drafting. It’s useful. The issue is when the tool replaces the thinking. When the output exists primarily to maintain presence rather than to contribute anything earned.

At that stage, the industry risks becoming an echo chamber of well-written summaries of each other.

Do people read it?

Yes. But not deeply.

Headlines are read.
A paragraph or two is scanned.
The rest is politely assumed to be insightful.

For readers who don’t know the author personally, volume can still signal credibility. A steady stream of well-formatted posts suggests expertise. But for those actually running operations — the people making hiring and consulting decisions — the evaluation is different. They’re looking for specifics. Trade-offs. Evidence that the author has been in the room when decisions were made and consequences followed.

When every article reads like a clean theoretical model, it becomes difficult to tell whether it comes from experience or from a prompt. Over time, that becomes obvious. Quietly. No announcements are made. Invitations simply change.

Where this leaves the rest of us

Publishing is part of the job now. That’s simply reality. Sharing ideas, observations, and experience helps the industry move forward and helps consultants stay visible. There’s nothing wrong with using tools to help produce content — provided the content still reflects something real.

From my side, anything I put out will be based on more than thirty years in this industry — on floors, in operations, in consulting engagements where decisions had consequences. It will reflect my own views, shaped by experience first and tools second. If a piece is short, it’s because the point didn’t need more words. If it’s longer, it’s because the topic deserved it. Either way, it will come from actual work rather than from a publishing quota.

AI can help with structure. It can speed things up. It can even improve clarity. What it can’t do is replace judgment earned over decades. That still has to be supplied manually.

The industry will adjust, as it always does. People who matter can usually tell the difference between something written from the floor and something written from a prompt. It may take a few paragraphs, but they get there.

In the meantime, we’ll all keep reading, nodding politely, and occasionally wondering when everyone suddenly found the time to publish twelve strategic manifestos a month while also allegedly running complex operations. Quite a feat, really.