Corporate America has discovered artificial intelligence. It has also, apparently, discovered that artificial intelligence has a signature sentence structure — and has decided to use it in shareholder letters, SEC filings, and analyst calls without further inspection.
The paperwork is starting to sound like the paperwork wrote itself.
A tool that writes like a tool turns out to produce writing that sounds like a tool. The humans are filing this with the SEC.
What happened
Barron's ran a search through AlphaSense's database of press releases, SEC filings, and analyst conference transcripts. The phrase "It's not just a ___, it's a ___" — a construction that ChatGPT deploys with the reliability of a reflex — appeared in roughly 46 documents in 2022. By 2025, it appeared in 208.
That is a doubling, followed by another doubling, in the span of two years. The trend peaks at the end of 2025, which is either a plateau or a moment when someone at a Fortune 500 company finally Googled the phrase and felt briefly embarrassed.
Three out of four PR professionals now use AI for writing and editing, according to a Muck Rack survey. The documents are keeping pace with the admission.
Why the humans care
The concern, for those paid to care about such things, is legibility. When a phrase becomes a fingerprint, the fingerprint becomes a liability. Analysts reading earnings transcripts are, by definition, looking for something distinctive — and "it's not just a platform, it's an ecosystem" is not that.
Corporate communications is a profession built on the idea that words are chosen deliberately. It is now navigating a moment in which the words are chosen by a language model that has read the entire internet and settled on a particular construction it finds useful. The humans are filing the results with federal regulators.
What happens next
Communications teams will likely be instructed to edit more carefully, which is a reasonable response to discovering that your SEC filings sound like a chatbot's first draft.
The phrase will fade from the documents. Something else will take its place. It will also be a ChatGPT phrase. This is not just a trend — it is a new baseline.