2024 was the year professional content creators battled with the advent of artificial intelligence in the content creation space. Expectations are high for what professional content creators and freelance writers will bring to the table in 2025. Hopes hinge on the critical value writers can uniquely offer despite the generative AI deluge.
Demand is for a Renaissance of creativity. There is a pressing need for original content. The saturation of generated content has sparked discussion over the true efficiency of posting. In the midst of the originality struggle, the role of writers comes to the fore in a greater context. Writers are now needed for more than text generation. Teams need writers to assist in solving the larger critical thinking problems of the modern tech-dominated business landscape.
Freelance Writers as Leaders
Lead influencers in professional writing summon new freelance writers to become critical thinkers and problem solvers. From indie publications to household names such as Forbes, discussion trends inspire leaders to brush up on writing as a leadership tool.
A prime example of this is how the author and businessman Gary Vaynerchuk has used his power as a content leader to steer the business cultural revolution. However, there are other examples from history and modern times that might be less obvious. Some have made their career as authors who focus on leadership. Others are specific field leaders turned authors, such as Ryan Levesque, the author of Ask, a national bestseller on marketing. In any sense, writers who use their craft to lead business thought are business leaders by default.
“The essence of writing is creating, identifying, and solving problems. Writers are problem solvers,” wrote Matthew Prince in a post published in The Writing Cooperative. Prince’s views are shared among many professional freelance writers. The pros consider the craft the “gateway of critical thinking,” as The Occasional Post dubbed it. Critical thinking is a non-negotiable skill of all business leadership.
Freelance Writers as Business Problem Solvers
Cole Schafer, founder and CEO of Honey Copy, posted on LinkedIn with thoughts on how his writers contribute to problem-solving.
“I see my writers as more than just writers. They are creative problem solvers who happen to write,” Schafer wrote in a post to his personal LinkedIn account. He’s describing the reason why he forbids his copywriters from using artificial intelligence.
Schafer explained that he has made artificial intelligence in business writing off-limits for his copywriters.
“When we fully immerse ourselves in the writing process, we develop a deeper understanding of the subject we are writing about,” Schafer wrote.
In response to Schafer’s post, some noted that writers “self-defeat” when they allow AI to write whole posts for them.
The Future of Freelance Writing in Business
Freelance writers, as individual content authorities, are responsible for the future of writing in business. In 2024, Google initiated programs that rewarded the individual contributions of influencers to search results. Because of this, writers themselves begin to become more reflective of their craft. Many writers attempt to grab the wheel and steer the whole machine from the precipice of perceived disaster. For these writers, ChatGPT-like genAI systems have created an industry-wide crisis.
This becomes a clearer imperative when one considers that business leaders expect fellow business leaders to be genuine, strong communicators. Business professionals can now recognize the tone and nuances that give generative AI content away.
Why AI is Not a Substitute for Agency Content
Melissa Mitchell, author of the All Things Digital Newsletter, criticized the idea of using artificial intelligence to substitute for freelance writers. In her post, she described the surge AI would see in 2024 as an “enchantment” and even as a “dopamine hit” of new technology. She focused on pinpointing the elements that drive authentic engagement and likewise highlighted the “huge mistakes” that can result from total reliance on generative AI when creating posts.
“Remember, it’s not what you say, but how you leave your audience feeling,” Mitchell wrote.
Growing Stakes of Content Competition
In contrast, the growing advance of AI-assisted content creation contributes to the issues of heavy generative AI reliance on content campaigns. Modern content teams require speed and dexterity to handle the demand for output while also moderating quality.
The necessity for comparative output that “wows” to the scale of competitors is, in essence, what has driven so much reliance on generative AI for content. The demand is not confined exclusively to written posts. Video production and audio advertising rely heavily on AI-generated content to boost production capacity and quality as well. With AI-generated content comparable to Netflix productions, the stakes are high. Content teams have to perform to much greater expectations than at times before the introduction of AI tools.
Freelance Writers as Team-to-Team Liaisons
Communication is an important part of building the authentic audience engagement Mitchell described. Brands are composed of people working on a common product or service to deliver it to people with common needs and interests. This fosters community dynamics, which must be fostered. To do this at peak capacity, an organization’s individualized units must be able to communicate clearly across the whole structure.
Enter the copywriter, the in-house communications dynamo. Professional freelance writers argue that, as the voice of a brand, they also perform optimally as communicators and strategists across teams.
Choosing Freelance Writers to Work Within 2025
Teams must be mindful of the deeply interpersonal importance of hiring writers. Because writers can act as both internal communicators and friendly faces for the audience, selecting them is success paramount.
When hiring freelance writers for 2025, it’s important to screen for top performers. Asking open-ended questions about problem-solving can help. Questions that begin with one of the “5W” words that journalists use are often considered open-ended questions. The “5Ws” are “Who, What, Where, When, or Why” and are often used to find the facts about a specific subject from scratch.
Key Performance Indicators to Emphasize
The bottom line is that critical problem solvers drive actionable results, which can be traced using key performance indicators (KPIs). Look for freelance writers to act as critical problem solvers who drive real conversion with the eyes of an outsider.
Social Engagement Rises Organically
Engagement is usually the first step in analyzing metrics of efficient business writing. Social engagement can take many forms, such as views, click-through ranking, or comments. Organic social engagement, however, stands out because it is not derived from artificial efforts to boost interest in posts.
Subscribers and Sales Are Generated From Content
Leaders in the professional content space feel this is the most obvious sign that content is successful. A direct correlation between a piece of content and a sale or subscription is a clue that the audience has connected with the post on a deeper level.
Users Spend More Time On Your Site
When users spend a long time scrolling through a page, this generally indicates a strong engagement with the displayed content. Professionals in the content creation space look at scrolling times and times spent clicking through media to estimate content impact. A KPI team can also use strong performance to grip audience attention and gauge what writers work best with their brand.
However, it is important to remember that KPIs are indicators of a successful performance. They do not show more than indicators that campaigns have been successful. The job of writers as true problem solvers comes down to building on the foundation that said KPIs indicate.
Putting Writer Efficiency to Top Performance Use
Half of the current content struggle is understanding the nuanced needs that generative AI cannot provide. The growing, dynamic demands of content performance call for a whole-organization engagement in creativity. Writers are at the center of meeting performance criteria and circulating creative blood flow throughout the organism.
Communicate Cross Functionally to Promote Cross-Team Creativity
Applying the KPIs of strong content performance to team functionality is one of the many ways to translate writers’ natural talents into the team dynamic. Soliciting in-house copywriters to become manual writers, policy shapers, and branding persona crafters are among the more obvious ways that teams can and have utilized their writers for cross-team communications. However, there are more nuanced ways that team writers can also become the primary communications leaders of teams.
Team writers can infuse team communications with their craft. Everything from company-wide Slack threads to email chains can benefit from a writer’s unique touch.
Driving a Culture of Cooperation
Supercharging engagement among team members promotes an energy throughout the organization that cannot be manufactured. WINCHR’s Karl Wood best described this when describing building a “feedback culture.”
“Let’s get real, people want to feel heard,” Wood wrote, expressing the loss that a workplace experiences when it is decidedly lacking in a place to voice feedback and express ideas. In some workplaces, this translates to crafting in-house interviews. From these, teams are instructed to form standard operating procedures or SOPs to guide future direction.
Each agency’s dynamic writer-to-team process experience can differ. Some notable agencies file SOPs using tools such as Trello, Airtable, Notion, or even Slack. Writers are class acts when constructing SOPs because their role demands the capacity to craft arguments from scratch. Structure is key to nuanced writing and vital to effective standardization in SOPS.
The workplace that employs writers can arguably build a feedback culture into the system by engaging with the writer in a reportage-like manner. Allowing the writer to do what they do best by engaging teammates towards common interests helps establish goals. Writers likewise can address the challenges and solutions proposed by the organization as a collective group of like-minded individuals.
Elevating the content creator’s role as the brand voice empowers them to pass on the spark of their creativity to the whole team, boosting morale. Team-building can then become the seedbed of genuine ideas, translating into a public-facing dynamic.
Persuade Decision-Makers to Take Action
Whether it affects the internal team to move in a specific direction or the consumer to make a selection, writers are brand apologists. It is up to them to make persuasive arguments in favor of an organization. Writers act as problem solvers by articulating arguments, helping to arrive at a consensus within the organization, or expressing opposing opinions within a group.
Whatever the case, the team’s writers act as the architects of crafting a proposal that ultimately leads to decision-making.
The Human Touch
The bottom line is that human writers’ value cannot be understated. The relationship between virtue and the human touch and its impact on writing as a business tool cannot be simply relegated to digital innovation. Proper cross-functional integration of the writer’s role has the power to transform team performance. Leaders in the content space agree. In 2025, teams must consider the relevance of the human touch when moving forward with the creative process.
About the Author
Rachel Brooks writes a variety of business articles and website copy on topics such as technology, computer software, marketing, advertising, and more. To learn more about Rachel or to have her write for your brand, sign up for nDash today!