LinkedIn used to be where ideas lived. Now it is a slot machine for corporate platitudes.

Scroll the feed and watch it happen in real time. A Big Four firm posts a pastel graphic about “the future of trust.” Five thousand likes. An Nvidia executive shares a stock image with the caption “AI will change everything.” Eight thousand likes. A partner at a global consulting shop reposts someone else’s repost of a Harvard summary of a McKinsey deck. Fourteen thousand likes.

None of it contains an original thought. None of it takes a position. None of it risks being wrong, because there is nothing in it that could be right or wrong.

This is not thought leadership. It is content-free affirmation dressed up as insight, and the algorithm rewards it because engagement is engagement. Likes are likes. The platform does not care whether the words mean anything, and increasingly, neither does the profession.

The AI wave has accelerated the rot. Every firm, every partner, every VP of something is now an AI thought leader.

The posts are interchangeable. We must embrace AI. AI is transforming every industry. The future is agentic. Ten thousand likes. Nothing said, no framework, no client example, no contrarian read, no number, no stake in the ground. Just the herd moving in the same direction, congratulating itself for arriving. All posts now require an AI generated cartoon, don’t forget that, very important

The complaint that LinkedIn has become Facebook misses the point. Facebook is honest about being a place for personal life, graduations, vacations, the dog, the politics. That has a place. The kid’s diploma is not the problem. The problem is a senior partner at a global firm posting a generic AI slogan next to a stock image of a robot hand touching a human hand, and the profession treating it as commentary. Does anyone really give a crap about Mark Zuckerberg’s workout routine, I mean seriously???? 

Real thought leadership has a point of view. It says something specific enough to be disagreed with. It costs the author something, reputational risk, intellectual effort, a position that might age badly. The feed is now dominated by people unwilling to pay any of those costs, and rewarded handsomely for refusing.

If a post could have been written by any firm, about any topic, in any year, it is not insight. It is noise with a logo.

The professionals worth following are still there. They are just buried under the confetti. Write something original, give insight, take a chance on challenging the status quo. It will set you apart from the herd, which is most people.