Corporate earnings calls and press releases show the most obvious AI writing tic of 2025 – that “not just X, it’s Y” construction. It went from ~50 mentions in 2023 to over 200 in 2025. Microsoft, Cisco, McKinsey, Accenture: all guilty. (Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch)
- Corporate earnings calls, press releases, and executive blog posts are flooding with the "not just X, it's Y" construction, a phrase so common in AI-generated text that its presence is now nearly diagnostic. AlphaSense data scanned by Barron's shows the phrase quadrupled from roughly 50 mentions in 2023 to over 200 in 2025, with Cisco, McKinsey, Accenture, and Satya Nadella all caught using it. The article itself is written entirely in the construction, which is either a clever joke or a cry for help.
