Citizen, marketer, editor

For thirty years, the hardest part of creating a customer story was beginning one. The blank page, the transcript that needed reading, the briefing documents, that hard first draft that nobody wanted to write.

That part of the job has gone; the model now does it for you, in ninety seconds, badly enough that you can fix it.

The skilled work has not disappeared. It's moved.

It has moved to everyone who touches the story. We no longer review, we edit. We have become, without quite noticing, Citizen Editors.

Twenty years ago, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba wrote Citizen Marketers, which gave a name to the shift from interruption marketing to advocate marketing; the recognition that customers were no longer just consumers, but active participants in how brands were built.

For me at least, that book defined a discipline.

The same shift is now happening in customer storytelling. The work used to belong to a narrow professional class; the writers, the agencies, the in-house specialists. The model has not eliminated that class. It has redistributed the work they do.

01  The Button and the blank page

Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick calls it 'The Button'. In Co-Intelligence he describes how students will use it to start essays, managers to start emails, scientists to write grant applications, artists for a first idea.

Everyone, in every kind of professional writing, will use it.

The Button doesn't just save time. It removes a specific kind of pain. Blank-page paralysis is not really a productivity problem; it's the moment of hardest cognitive load, when you hold an entire universe of possible openings in your head and have to choose one.

That moment no longer survives contact with a tool that produces a competent first draft in seconds.

In a traditional customer storytelling workflow, the ability to distill twenty competing requirements into one shape that satisfies all of them, self-editing on the fly – was where most of the value sat.

Then, everyone else reacted to the draft; some were already doing editorial work, they were just not called editors.

Some things have not changed; the journalistic writing approach creates wonderful experiences for advocates and unearths the unexpected. Writers are not redundant; they are, if anything, freed. Their instincts, honed over years, remain a valuable part of the workflow.

Yet with the arrival of The Button, what we need now is skill in the next part of the process.

02  What Citizen Editors actually do

The role is not metaphorical. Five examples, drawn from any reasonably mature customer advocacy program.

The story owner who reads the AI-drafted story and decides the angle is wrong; that the genuinely interesting moment in the transcript is not there.
Judgement about what the story is actually about.

The advocate who sees their own quote in black and white and asks for a softer phrasing, because the model's version is technically what they said, but not what they wish to see in black and white.
Judgement about voice.

The product marketer who flags that a feature mention has been overstated (not often!).
Judgement about accuracy.

The legal reviewer who removes a competitor's name.
Judgement about risk.

The CSM who notices the implementation timeline has been compressed for narrative effect.
Judgement about consequence.

None of this removes the need for journalism. Finding the story worth telling, building the relationship with the advocate, conducting the kind of interview that produces material worth editing in the first place; this is irreplaceable work, and it sits with the freelance writers, the producers, and the agencies who have always understood that customer storytelling begins long before the first draft.

What has changed is the work that comes after. Once a draft exists, stakeholders are doing something new.

This is why I think we are ready for Editor-Enhanced Content. The model handles what was hardest about beginning. The Citizen Editors handle what was always hardest about finishing: knowing what the story could be, knowing when it's compelling, knowing when it's not.

03  Why this matters now

B2B buying has moved into the machine. Trust has not moved with it.

Adoption is near-total. Forrester's Buyers' Journey Survey, 2025 found 94% of business buyers now use generative AI somewhere in the purchase, up from 89% a year earlier; generative AI and conversational search are now the most meaningful research source they name, ahead of vendor websites, product experts and sales.

Trust has gone the other way. Those same buyers do not rely on what the tools tell them. They treat genAI as a first step, then validate with peers, analysts and the providers themselves; only a third feel more confident in a decision for having used it, while one in five come away less confident, having hit information that was unreliable or simply wrong.

This is the trust gap: buyers reaching for AI first and believing it least, sifting an avalanche of content that looks credible on the surface but cannot survive their scrutiny.

So the adoption curve and the trust curve are moving in opposite directions. The programs that thrive will be the ones whose prospective customers continue to recognise themselves in the stories being told.

In the age of The Button, that makes editing critical. The content that survives that scrutiny will be Editor-Enhanced Content: drafted by the model, owned by the editor. We're all Citizen Editors now.

04  What comes next

This is the founding piece for Proof Positive. Every fortnight, we take a specific part of this argument and put it under a microscope.

Next issue: where the line between humans and AI actually sits in customer storytelling, and why it is not a single line. The blend changes depending on what kind of story you are producing and what is at stake.

Subscribe if you have not. Forward to one person you think should be reading this if you have.

Robin Hamilton is the founder of Proofpoints, the customer storytelling platform launching in 2026. Previously, cofounder and CEO of inEvidence. Proof Positive is published fortnightly.

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