Phrase Surge Signals AI in Business Communications
Barron’s analysis of AlphaSense’s database shows the construction 'It’s not just X—it’s Y' exploded in corporate news releases, earnings reports, and filings: from about 50 uses in 2023 to over 200 in 2025—a more than fourfold increase. This pattern, common in 2025 frontier LLMs, appears at high rates in formulaic, requirement-driven writing like press releases, where emotional variation is low, making AI assistance likely though not provable.
Max Spero, CEO of AI detection tool Pangram, notes the base rate is elevated enough that spotting the phrase flags potential synthetic text, especially in corporate docs over-reliant on generative tools.
Concrete Examples from Tech Leaders
The tic permeates high-profile posts:
- Cisco: “In 2025, AI won’t just be a tool; it will be a collaborator.”
- Accenture: “The future of autonomy isn’t just on the horizon; it’s already unfolding.”
- Workday: “DevOps teams are managing not just deployments, but also security compliance and cloud spending.”
- McKinsey: “These systems aren’t just executing tasks; they’re starting to learn, adapt, and collaborate.”
- Microsoft (Satya Nadella): Multiple uses, e.g., “It’s not just about building tools for specific roles or tasks. It’s about building tools that empower everyone to create their own tools.”
Root Cause and Broader Tells
LLMs amplify this from their training data—corporate writing styles scraped without permission—which loops back to produce more of it. Em-dashes (—) serve as another AI giveaway. For builders shipping AI content pipelines or marketing copy, scan for these to audit authenticity: they reveal over-reliance on models, turning 'catchy' phrasing into a symptom of synthetic overload.