Everyone’s fighting for attention by publishing more. Josh Ritchie says the brands actually winning are doing the opposite.
Josh is the co-founder of Column Five, a creative agency that’s spent 16 years helping B2B SaaS companies tell their story at scale. In this episode of In Conversation, Focus Lab CEO Bill Kenney sits down with Josh to unpack what’s actually changed in B2B content — and what hasn’t — in a market now flooded with AI-generated everything.
The moment everything shifted
Josh points to a specific inflection point: Google changed its search algorithm at almost the exact same moment that ChatGPT and Claude rolled out. Two tectonic shifts at once. The top-of-funnel, cast-a-wide-net content strategy that had worked for 15 years suddenly stopped working. Buyer behavior flipped overnight.
The signal? Josh was hanging out with friends — a logistics guy and a musician, not tech people — when one of them said, “Let me chat that.” Not Google it. Chat it. “I remember hearing that and thinking, oh sh*t. This is mainstream.”
The shift isn’t theoretical. Bill notes that half of Focus Lab’s inbound leads now cite AI search as how they found the agency — a number that would have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago.
Good SEO still feeds good AEO
Despite what you may have heard, SEO isn’t dead — the rules just changed. What led to good search rankings seven years ago is different from what works now. The bottom-of-funnel, mid-funnel content that used to be an afterthought now matters more than ever, both for search and for AI discovery. Brands that have been clear and consistent about their positioning for years are better positioned than they realize. Tenure and consistency are an asset in the AI era.
The case for niching down
One of the most compelling moments in the conversation is Josh’s candid take on differentiation. Everyone knows conceptually that the strongest brands have a clear point of view and aren’t trying to be everything to everybody. Actually doing it is another matter entirely.
“The pressure to do something that might turn away business — that’s scary,” Josh says. “But if you’ve done it, if you’ve positioned and niched down, you know it’s better on the other side.”
His advice: focus on quality and clarity over quantity. Stay in your lane. And recognize that authenticity is its own form of differentiation. A brand that genuinely owns its position reads completely differently than one that adopted it because it seemed advantageous. Audiences can tell.
What Column Five’s AI code of ethics actually looks like
Rather than waiting for clients to ask how they use AI, Column Five published their own AI code of ethics proactively. The philosophy: be transparent, own your decisions about where AI does and doesn’t play a role, and make that accessible before anyone has to ask. They’re not using it for creative work or client blog posts. They are using it for workflow efficiency — resizing assets, cleaning up data, removing drudgery.
Josh also raises something most people aren’t talking about: many marketing and creative teams are now fielding board mandates to work with “AI-forward agencies.” He expects that pressure to subside over the next year or two, the same way “cloud computing” stopped being a differentiator and just became table stakes.
Advice for founders just getting started
If you’re early-stage and staring down the content question, Josh’s take is refreshingly practical. You have no brand equity to protect and no audience to disappoint — that’s actually a gift. Go try things. Fall flat. Make something terrible, then make something good. Learn what works by doing it, not by planning it.
And reach out to people further ahead than you, even if you can’t afford to hire them yet. Josh and Bill are both clear on this: the conversation doesn’t have to turn into a project. Sometimes the most valuable thing is just talking to someone who’s already figured out the part you’re stuck on.
In Conversation is a Focus Lab series where CEO Bill Kenney sits down with agency peers and industry leaders to share what they’re seeing in the market — unfiltered.
