Why corporate press releases are sounding more like AI models

A specific sentence construction—It’s not just X, it’s Y—has seen a sharp increase in corporate communications. According to a report by Barron’s, which scanned the database of market intelligence firm AlphaSense, the use of this phrasing in corporate news releases, earnings reports, and government filings has grown significantly. The data shows that mentions of the phrase rose from about 50 mentions in 2023 to over 200 uses in 2025.

Several corporations have recently used variations of this sentence structure in their public communications. For instance, Cisco stated that in 2025, AI will act as a collaborator rather than just a tool. Accenture declared that the future of autonomy is already unfolding rather than just being on the horizon. Similarly, Workday noted that DevOps teams manage security compliance and cloud spending in addition to deployments, while McKinsey wrote that certain systems are starting to learn, adapt, and collaborate instead of just executing tasks. Microsoft executive Satya Nadella also used the construction in a blog post, writing that the company’s founder envisioned a software factory rather than just a software company. The same blog post noted that the goal is to empower everyone to create their own tools rather than just building tools for specific roles, and asked readers to imagine if all 8 billion people could summon a researcher to get things done.

Max Spero, the CEO of AI detection tool Pangram, notes that this phrasing is a tic preferred by 2025-era frontier language models—which are advanced, large-scale AI models. However, Spero cautions that the base rate of occurrence for this sentence structure is high enough that its existence is not a definitive smoking gun for AI use. “The base rate of occurrence for this sentence structure is high enough that its existence is no smoking gun for AI use, but it’s clear that press releases and company documents, writing driven by requirements and not emotion, are seeing an even higher incidence of AI use,” Spero said.

The prevalence of this construction reflects how generative AI tools were trained on human writing. This training process has drawn criticism from writers, some of whom characterize the unauthorized use of their work as insulting to writers — it’s a violation.

Why it matters

The It’s not just X, it’s Y sentence construction has become a common indicator of AI-generated text in corporate communications, with usage quadrupling between 2023 and 2025. This trend highlights how deeply corporate writing has become reliant on automated generation tools.