Something shifted in the AI world, and most people haven't noticed yet.
According to new data from eMarketer, marketers are leaning on Claude more than any other AI tool when it comes to content creation. Not ChatGPT. Not Gemini. Claude, the chatbot built by Anthropic.
That caught my attention. Why?
I've been writing on the road since 2017. Articles, newsletters, website copy, the occasional rant about airline baggage fees. I've tried just about every AI writing tool that's come out, because when you're running a business from a laptop in a hotel room in Lisbon or a coworking space in Chiang Mai, you don't have a marketing department down the hall. You have yourself, a WiFi signal, and whatever software actually works.
So when marketers — people whose entire job depends on words that convert, persuade, and don't sound like a robot wrote them — start favoring one AI tool over the others, that's worth paying attention to.
Here's what I think is going on.
Claude has built a reputation for producing writing that feels less stiff. Less like a corporate memo generator and more like something a human might actually say. If you've spent any time with different AI models, you know they each have a personality, whether the companies admit it or not. Some are chatty. Some are robotic. Some pad every answer with disclaimers until you want to throw your laptop into the ocean.
Marketers care about tone because tone is everything. A blog post, an email, a product description — if it sounds generic, people tune out. We're flooded with content now. Everyone's publishing. The stuff that gets noticed is the stuff that sounds like somebody actually wrote it, with opinions, rhythm, and a point of view.
That's not a small thing. That's the whole game.
I'll be honest, I was skeptical of AI writing tools at first. Nineteen years running a publishing company taught me that good writing comes from lived experience, not algorithms. What happens if I hand a tool my years of travel stories and asked it to help me organize my thinking, not replace it?
What I found is that the usefulness depends entirely on the model's ability to sound like a person instead of a search engine with opinions. That's apparently what marketers are discovering with Claude too. It's not about replacing writers. It's about having a collaborator that doesn't sound like it's reading from a script.
So why does this matter to you, even if you've never written a marketing email in your life?
Because this is a preview of where creative work is heading. Whether you're building a small travel blog, running a side business, or just trying to write better emails to your grandkids, these tools are becoming part of how people communicate. The companies that win aren't the flashiest. They're the ones that actually understand how humans talk.
I think there's a bigger lesson here too, one that goes beyond marketing. The tools that succeed aren't always the biggest or the most hyped. Sometimes the quieter option, the one that does the job without a lot of noise, wins because it respects the user's intelligence. That's true in software. It's also true in life.
I've made a career out of choosing the unconventional path — leaving a stable life to travel full-time at an age when most people are shopping for recliners, not plane tickets. People ask me why. My answer is usually some version of: because it made more sense for me than the alternative.
Marketers choosing Claude over the more famous names is a small example of the same instinct. Don't pick the tool everyone's talking about. Pick the one that actually works for what you're trying to do.
So here's my question for you. Have you tried any of these AI writing tools yourself? Not to replace your voice, but to sharpen it?
Try one. See what happens. Adjust. Keep moving.
That's how you learn anything worth learning, whether it's a new piece of software or a new country you've never set foot in.
Source: eMarketer
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