# Persuasion just became a commodity. Influence did not — Voice Affairs 10 > In June, researchers from Oxford, the UK AI Security Institute, the LSE and Stanford published a result that our profession has been half-expecting… Source: https://voice-sc.com/voice-affairs/issue-10/ Voice Affairs — Issue 10 · 2 October 2026 # Persuasion just became a commodity. Influence did not By Jacopo Garone ## The Briefing Once a month, we publish an editorial on how influence works in Europe today, a legislative radar on what is moving in Brussels, and a note on the work behind it. Written for the decision-maker’s chair, and for those who advise it. Issue 10 · 2 October 2026 ## Persuasion just became a commodity. Influence did not In June, researchers from Oxford, the UK AI Security Institute, the LSE and Stanford published a result that our profession has been half-expecting for two years. Across 18,978 conversations with 6,923 people, AI systems were reliably more persuasive than the best human persuaders the researchers could find, from tournament winners and professional canvassers to world championship debaters. In a real-world test, AI was nearly three times as effective as professional fundraisers at raising money for Save the Children. If a machine can win the argument, what exactly are firms like Voice selling?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 01 Editorial Content By Jacopo Garone PERSUASION JUST BECAME A COMMODITY. INFLUENCE DID NOT In June, researchers from Oxford, the UK AI Security Institute, the LSE and Stanford published a result that our profession has been half-expecting for two years. Across 18,978 conversations with 6,923 people, AI systems were reliably more persuasive than the best human persuaders the researchers could find, from tournament winners and professional canvassers to world championship debaters. In a real-world test, AI was nearly three times as effective as professional fundraisers at raising money for Save the Children. If a machine can win the argument, what exactly are firms like Voice selling? The easy answer is relationships. Relationships matter, and always will, but on their own they are an incomplete answer. I think the research says something more precise, and more useful, about where the value in influence is moving. What the machines are actually good at The detail that matters is not that AI won; it is how it won. The authors found converging evidence that its advantage came from "rapidly deploying larger quantities of information". When the AI was forced to write human-length messages at human speed, its lead over the best coached debaters fell to zero. The humans tried to compete on the same ground. After practising against the AI that had beaten them, elite debaters wrote longer messages and used 54% more fact-checkable claims per conversation. Their persuasiveness did not significantly improve. Volume is a contest humans cannot win, and the study shows it. This fits an earlier and larger result. In December 2025, a team led by the same first author published in Science the findings of nearly 77,000 conversations with 19 language models. The most persuasive systems were those that produced information-dense arguments, packed with claims that can be checked. Read this way, persuasion is less a talent than a throughput problem, and throughput is what machines are for. The price of volume Two further findings complicate the picture, and both matter to anyone whose reputation is exposed. First, the same Science study found a trade-off: the more persuasive a model is, the less accurate its information tends to be. Optimising for conviction erodes the very thing that makes a claim safe to repeat. Second, in September, Reed Orchinik of Carnegie Mellon and David Rand of Cornell tested a single warning on 3,208 Americans: that language models can be prompted to persuade or manipulate, and may present information selectively. It cut the persuasive effect of AI by roughly half (48%) without denting general trust in the technology. One line of disclosure, and half the effect is gone. Read together, these results suggest that the argument was never the whole of persuasion. Who is speaking and whether they can be trusted to mean it carry a weight that no volume of information can replace. The industry has already noticed The commercial response is already visible. In August, Burson, part of WPP, acquired Limbik, whose platform predicts "the virality and believability of messaging to determine impact before it reaches the market" across more than 60 markets. It will run across the WPP network. Large groups are turning persuasion into infrastructure: tested, scored and deployed at scale. That is a rational move, and it will work for mass audiences. But it confirms the point. If persuasion can be pre-tested, generated and optimised by software, it will be priced like software. Anyone whose offer is "we build the strongest arguments" now competes with a machine that builds more of them, faster, for less. The wrong reflex AI has already transformed advocacy and influence, above all in digital spaces. The real question is how institutions respond, and the early signs worry me. When the EU tightened its rules on political advertising last autumn, the largest platforms did not adapt. Meta and Google stopped carrying political advertising in the EU altogether, citing legal uncertainty. Bad actors lost a channel. So did every legitimate organisation that wanted to make its case openly, with its name on it. Researchers tracking the aftermath have already seen political influence shift into less transparent channels. A rule written for transparency ended up shrinking the most transparent form of paid advocacy there is. The Orchinik and Rand study points to a better answer. One line telling people that a machine may be trying to persuade them halved its effect, and left their trust in the technology intact. That is not a case for silencing the messenger. It is a case for educating the audience. Citizens who understand how persuasion works, and who is behind a message, are harder to manipulate by anyone, human or machine. Restricting legitimate professionals does the opposite: it leaves the field to those who never intended to sign their work. What remains scarce So what does not become a commodity? I see three things, and none of them is sentimental. 01. Vision: choosing the argument, not just winning it In these studies the goal was fixed in advance: move this person, on this issue, now. The AI was very good at that. Nobody asked it which argument was worth having, how to frame it, when to raise it, or whether to raise it at all. That is strategic vision, and the creativity that goes with it: seeing the fight before it starts and choosing which one to pick. It also includes knowing what not to say. A system optimised to convince will trade truth for effect unless someone decides it should not. 02. Access: the relationship and the room The studies measured members of the public, in text, in paid online sessions, and the largest of them is still a preprint awaiting peer review. The authors say so themselves. That is not where the decisions that matter in regulated sectors are made. Those happen in small rooms, with small, informed and sceptical audiences: officials, regulators, investors, journalists who have read the file and know the people making the case. What opens those rooms is a relationship built over years; what keeps them open is competence. In those rooms, information is the least scarce thing on the table. 03. Attribution: a name that answers A message is worth what the name behind it is worth. When people know a machine may be arguing a brief, they discount it by half. A named person or organisation that will answer for a claim, next month and next year, is the one thing an AI cannot supply on anyone's behalf. Persuasion is winning an argument. Influence is being the party whose word still counts after the argument is over. The first has just become a commodity. The second has not. What changes if you operate in a regulated sector Three practical consequences follow. First, separate the two. Much of what organisations call communication is argument production: briefings, Q&As, position papers, social copy. Much of it can and will be automated. The part that cannot is the mandate: who decides the strategy, who signs, who speaks, who answers. That is where the investment should go. Second, treat accuracy as capital, not compliance. If the most persuasive systems are the least accurate, the organisations that keep their claims checkable will be the ones still believed when a claim is challenged, whether by a journalist, a regulator or an activist. Third, disclose before you are asked. Audiences discount what they suspect is machine-made. Saying clearly where AI is used, and where it is not, turns a vulnerability into a signal of confidence. At Voice, we use AI every day to read more, and faster, than any team could. We do not let it decide what a client should say, or to whom. That is where our work begins. On whose behalf The authors close their paper by noting that the question is no longer whether AI can out-persuade humans, but how, where and on whose behalf this capability will be exercised. For those of us who advise organisations on how to be heard, that last clause is the job. So here is the question worth asking this month: if a machine can make your case better than you can, will anyone still believe it is yours? Sources and further reading Hackenburg, K. et al., AI systems out-persuade expert humans, arXiv preprint 2606.16475, June 2026 Hackenburg, K. et al., The levers of political persuasion with conversational artificial intelligence, Science, December 2025 Orchinik, R. and Rand, D., A light-touch AI literacy intervention helps protect against AI political persuasion, arXiv preprint 2609.16432, September 2026 Votta, F., What data reveals about Meta and Google's political ad ban in the EU, Tech Policy Press, 3 November 2025 Burson, Burson acquires cognitive AI company Limbik, 12 August 2026 02 Legislative Radar By Thembi 01. ENERGY & FUELS: WHAT COUNTS AS EUROPEAN? On 11 September, the European Parliament's committees responsible for international trade, industry and energy, and the internal market published a draft report on the Industrial Accelerator Act (2026/0068(COD)), a fresh step in work on the file. Parliament's position remains under development. The Commission's proposal would use public procurement and support schemes to strengthen demand for European and low-carbon industrial products, including clean technologies. Requirements vary by sector, with specific low-carbon criteria proposed for steel. Why it matters: for energy and industrial businesses, the practical stakes are procurement eligibility, sourcing flexibility and investment decisions. Origin requirements could support European manufacturing while creating difficulties for projects that depend on international suppliers. Engagement should therefore focus on product coverage, workable origin definitions and compliance evidence. Concrete examples of supply constraints and cost implications can help shape these provisions while negotiations remain open. Want to know how origin rules could affect your procurement eligibility? GET IN TOUCH 02. AI & DIGITAL REGULATION: CLOUD SOVEREIGNTY: PROCUREMENT FIRST, PRIVATE OBLIGATIONS LATER? On 17 September, the European Parliament announced the referral of the Cloud and AI Development Act (2026/0138(COD)) to its committees responsible for industry and energy and for the internal market. The proposal introduces four sovereignty assurance levels for cloud services, covering data location, independence from third countries and European control. Public procurement is the central focus: risk assessments would determine the levels required for sensitive public-sector activities. For private businesses, Article 31 initially provides for voluntary assessments in the relevant sectors covered by the EU's NIS2 cybersecurity directive. Under specified conditions, the Commission could subsequently require assessments and mitigation measures through delegated acts. Why it matters: energy, transport and other critical-sector businesses should scrutinise the triggers and safeguards for any future obligations. Supplier availability, migration costs and operational continuity are the concrete issues to raise during the legislative negotiations. Want to know when voluntary could become mandatory for your sector? [EXPLORE THEMBI](https://www.thembi.ai/) 03 News and More IN CASE YOU MISSED IT SHAPING THE CONVERSATION Voice has a new identity and a new website. Both start from one distinction: adding to the noise is not the same as shaping the conversation. The organisations that handle complexity best know exactly what to say, when, and how to reach their audience. Our positioning and four core capabilities are now built around that idea. Be the voice, not an echo. [Discover our new identity](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/voice-strategic-consulting_voicestrategicconsulting-rebranding-activity-7507731489720070144-cv-g?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACpUjOEBoIsx54y7O-Oh9GBGWWdw3JNeVBM) BIOREFINERY: A STORY TO BE TRUSTED Our team spent a day at Xanthos , a biorefinery in the Adamant Group, developing content and shaping its communication strategy for the months ahead. The energy transition is as much a communication challenge as an industrial one: technical detail has to become something credible and clear to stakeholders with very different levels of knowledge. That translation is the work we do best. [See our day at Xanthos](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/voice-strategic-consulting_voicestrategicconsulting-energytransition-activity-7503751324887519233-xzvz?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACpUjOEBoIsx54y7O-Oh9GBGWWdw3JNeVBM) 700 ALUMNI IN LONDON. NOW THEY HAVE A CHAPTER Our co-founder and Co-CEO Jacopo Garone has been appointed Head of the London Chapter of IULM Alumni, after two years on the association's Steering Committee. More than 700 Università IULM alumni work in London across finance, fashion, media, consulting and tech: a community that already exists but does not yet know itself. The first gathering is on 4 November in London. [Join the London Chapter](https://lnkd.in/p/euZFJKkK) 04 Leading lines A monthly column by Stefano Musso , Senior Advisor at Voice, on leadership as a form of strategic communication: what leaders say, and what their behaviour says for them. WHEN BEHAVIOUR SPEAKS LOUDER THAN WORDS There is the leader who calls meetings to give orders, explain a strategy and motivate the team, and there is the leader who embodies all of that in how they act. The difference is one of substance, not form, and followers read it clearly. Leading by example is a communication strategy in itself. A leader's communication rests less on the rousing speech than on the quiet consistency of everyday conduct. A manager who keeps learning, studies the context before deciding, owns a mistake instead of passing it to the team, listens, and shares both responsibility and credit is already communicating a method, a set of values and a standard. Every action works twice: once through its direct effect, and again through how it is read and imitated by those watching. A curious leader breeds curiosity. A leader who takes responsibility in the storm builds trust. The same happens in the water. Surfers convince no one with words. They communicate through how they paddle out, how they fall and how they get back up. At sea, rank on land counts for nothing: what speaks for you is respecting priority, watching out for the person beside you and keeping calm when a bigger set rolls in. The experienced surfer who greets others with a smile, can ride any wave and still knows when to give way, teaches without saying a word. Leadership styles vary, and each can make sense in its context. Leading by example works in all of them: paddling out first, falling with the others, getting back up and helping them do the same, admitting fear in a rough sea while still setting the direction, and getting through it together with the people who follow. A provocation: a surfer can easily become a good leader; the reverse is far less true. To prove me wrong, those who lead might ask themselves not only what they communicate when they speak, but what they communicate when no one is asking them anything. [EXPLORE ON SUBSTACK](https://substack.com/@stefanomusso) If AI is changing how influence works, the real question is who is shaping the rules of visibility - and who is reacting too late. We will continue exploring this throughout the year. Enjoyed this edition? 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