News and Insights

I Asked AI to Kill Business Jargon. Here’s What Happened.

August 21, 2025

I had been a journalist for 13 years before I transitioned to public relations. In my first week, someone started discussing the roster of SMEs at a client firm. 

“What’s an SME?” I asked. 

I have a distinct memory of this moment. A few people gave me looks that implied a sudden realization that my resume may have been fake. But it’s true. Despite years of working with words and dealing with people in law, politics, business, and entertainment, I’d never come across the term before. 

Look, I have plenty of shortcomings. A limited vocabulary is not one of them. I occasionally find myself explaining the history and meaning of the word “lagniappe.” Which is to say that, if I don’t know what a word or phrase means, that’s a good sign it’s jargon.

The term SME is indeed jargon, used frequently in marketing, engineering, medicine, and other knowledge-based industries. It stands for “subject matter expert.” 

Why couldn’t we use the word “expert?” ‘Spokesperson’ would also have sufficed. 

I was thinking about all this recently as I was trying to edit a piece of content I had written on behalf of an executive. It discussed the best way to deliver value and accelerate digital transformation, one of those articles where things were never used, only utilized, leveraged, and optimized. You get the picture. It was full of boring, overused verbs that made my eyes glaze over.  

It got me thinking about the reasons jargon is bad, and ways I might use AI to help fight it.

The Problem With Buzzwords and Jargon

The world is awash in jargon, corporatese, and buzzwords. They’re useful when they help get things done faster. Oftentimes, they don’t. What’s more, using jargon and buzzwords can have clear negative consequences. The problem is, most of us don’t recognize when we’re using them. It’s a rare day if I don’t use the term SME twice before lunch. 

Research from Columbia University links jargon use to feelings of insecurity. Just as a Brooklyn brogue gives us some clues as to who a person is, or where they came from, the use of words like ‘leverage’ or ‘disrupt’ can signal membership in certain MBA-credentialed tech circles. Context matters here. When making a pitch to investors, too much jargon can be a signal that someone isn’t confident about their status. In internal settings, it can also show that a junior employee is invested in the work and seeking to convey mastery. Plain language, by contrast, conveys authority and expertise in either situation. 

Another study found that buzzword-laden language makes people doubt the speaker’s credibility. A report from the NeuroLeadership Institute found 31% of office employees think managers using corporate jargon appear insincere.

AI Makes It Worse (And Better)

Verbs are the most powerful part of every sentence. But too often, we leverage a handful of overused tropes to transform actual stories into generic content. We implement buzzwords that optimize nothing and enhance confusion while driving transformational boredom and facilitating seamless eye-rolling across all communication initiatives. Those bolded words are the worst offenders: tired, often meaningless, and absolutely pervasive in business communications..  

ChatGPT and other generative AI models are likely making this problem worse. That’s because they are built on a statistical model of past language use. Since so much business writing is saturated with words like “leverage,” “optimize,” “transform,” and “facilitate,” the AI naturally gravitates toward these overused terms because they appear frequently in similar contexts.

The generative AI model Claude disputed this assessment. It argued that we can, of course, ask it to avoid jargon and buzzwords. 

“The real culprit isn’t the AI defaulting to jargon,” Claude said. “It’s that humans keep feeding it prompts that essentially ask for jargony content. If someone requests a “strategic whitepaper on digital transformation best practices,” they’re likely to get exactly the buzzword-filled content they asked for, regardless of whether a human or AI wrote it.”

Claude has a point. We reap what we sow. But I’d like to extend the thought that there is power in how we prompt. AI can actually help us fight jargon in three ways:

I asked it to generate lists of the 50 most overused and 100 most underused verbs in B2B communications. Someone else at the firm turned those lists into an automated editor that could spot tired business verbs and suggest replacements.

AI excels at research. Writers tackling complex topics without deep expertise tend to hide behind buzzwords. AI can dig into technical papers, industry reports, and expert analyses to give you the substantive understanding that lets you write with genuine authority.

And here’s where we circle back to those SMEs. You can use AI as an SME translator. My most frequent prompt is “Explain like I’m in 10th grade.” It takes the tribal knowledge of subject matter experts and translates it into something any intelligent person can understand.

So here’s to using artificial intelligence for the most human purpose imaginable: helping people understand each other. No leverage or optimization required, just a willingness to speak plainly.