The Revival of the Long Form

This is a long piece. That's intentional. In fact, it's the whole point.

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And it's not because 'long' is easier… but because 'long' is going to be the trend because of AI.

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There is no longer a need to be as punchy as possible. Actually: punchy is hurting your business. If this sounds odd, bear with me… for a looong time. Or copy paste this to an LLM and ask for a TLDR through your lens ;)

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The Switch from Short, Shorter, Shortest to Long Form

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For the past thirty years, we've been in a race to compress. Movies got faster. We live in the era of memes. Today if you can't make your point in 60 seconds, you lost the audience. Young professionals struggle with articles longer than 800 words—or even 400 if you ask me.

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And while Gen AI summarizes everything for us too and we don't need to read the entire thing anymore… that is where the power of long form comes in. Because if we start from a one-pager with minimal context, what does an LLM have to work with? Not much. That is where it starts to make things up, hallucinate and sound like a marketing brochure. And now more than ever: Context is everything.

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The counterintuitive shift

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Most organizations are still optimizing for brevity. Tighter messaging. Shorter proposals. Punchier presentations.

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But that was yesterday's solution. Today's solution is: go long form and let AI shorthand it for you, for them, for John, for Sarah. And everybody's shorthand will be a bit different. Personalized.

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The constraint was processing power and time. A busy executive couldn't possibly read a 20-page strategy document. Time was the real scarcity. So we compressed those documents to five pages. A prospect wouldn't wade through your entire value proposition, so you boiled it down to three bullet points and fingers crossed that those were the right ones.

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Gen AI just... eliminates that bottleneck. Completely. Not because people have more time, but when we add processing power to our long form, we're golden.

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When someone asks Claude or ChatGPT about your company, the LLM doesn't get tired. It doesn't skim. It searches your entire three-decade story, every document you've published, all your various profiles and materials, and delivers a perfectly organized summary tailored to exactly what that person wants to know. No coffee break needed.

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Your content doesn't need to be short anymore. It needs to be complete.

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Why high-resolution information wins

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I call it high-resolution information. Think of it like the difference between a compressed JPEG and a RAW image file. The JPEG loads faster and takes up less space, but you can't zoom in without seeing pixels. The RAW file contains everything, letting you crop, adjust, and examine any detail you want.

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For the past 20 years, we've been creating JPEGs because that's all people had time to consume. Now we can create RAW files because AI handles the processing real time.

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Here's what that looks like in practice:

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Take a business proposal for tech services. The traditional approach was to compress it ruthlessly. What's the client trying to achieve? One paragraph. What's their context? Another paragraph. Technical approach? Keep it high-level.

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You made these cuts because nobody would read 30 pages. But in cutting, you lost crucial context. You lost the nuance that helps different stakeholders understand why this matters to them specifically. The more complex and nuanced the offer, the more of a problem this is.

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The CFO needs different information than the CTO. The implementation team lead cares about different details than the executive sponsor. A 5-page proposal forces everyone to extract their answers from the same compressed information. A 30-page proposal lets each person's AI pull exactly what they need.

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The multiplier effect of complete context

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Here's the thing: this is about the compounding value of comprehensive context.

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When you include everything, readers can ask questions you never anticipated. The finance person can query your proposal about long-term cost implications. The technical lead can drill into your stack decisions. The operations director can explore staffing impact.

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Each stakeholder interacts with your complete thinking through their own lens.

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That 30-page document isn't asking for 6x more time than a 5-page document. It's offering 10x more utility by letting every reader construct their own personalized 5-page view.

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Nobody reads all 30 pages linearly anymore. They skim it, feed it to their AI assistant, and ask the three to seven questions that matter to them specifically. Your job isn't to predict which five pages everyone needs. Your job is to provide the complete picture so their AI can extract their personalized five pages.

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Where this shows up first

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Strategy documents are the obvious example. We spent years learning to compress everything into 15-20 slides for presentations. Compressing all that into 20 slides meant leaving out 95% of the thinking.

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Stop asking "How do I compress this into 20 slides?" Start asking "How do I structure the complete thinking so different readers can extract what matters to them?"

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Stop making strategy slide decks. Create comprehensive documents and let readers generate their own 'presentation'.

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The European sales lead and the US technical director will create different slide sets from the same offering backdrop. That's not a bug, but a feature! They have different contexts, different challenges, different questions. Your backdrop narratives should be rich enough to answer all of them.

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The proposal revolution

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Proposals get even more interesting because they're explicitly competitive.

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Traditional proposals competed on clarity and brevity. But that optimization assumed everyone cared about the same value proposition. And they don't.

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The executive sponsor cares about strategic fit and business outcomes. The technical evaluator cares about architecture decisions. The finance reviewer cares about cost structure. The implementation lead cares about methodology. The procurement officer cares about risk mitigation.

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One-size-fits-all proposals force all these people to extract their answers from the same compressed narrative. Complete proposals let each evaluator construct their own narrative. They can ask your document their specific questions and get answers grounded in your full thinking.

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You're not competing on compression anymore. You're competing on completeness, on depth, on having actually thought through all the angles rather than just presenting three angles well.

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The execution plan opportunity

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Same principle applies to execution plans, implementation roadmaps, process documentation, strategic initiatives, transformation programs.

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We learned to summarize these down to milestones and deliverables. But the details matter enormously to different stakeholders. The program manager needs granular task breakdowns. The executive sponsor needs clear decision points. The finance team needs spending curves. The technical teams need dependency maps.

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You can't put all that in a 10-page plan that anyone would actually read. You can put it in a 40-page plan that everyone's AI can query.

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What this means for how we work

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Look, this isn't just "write more stuff." It's a fundamental shift in how we think about information.

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We used to ask how to compress complex topics into something digestible. The better question is how to structure complete thinking so different readers can extract different insights.

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Before: "What's the one thing everyone needs to know?" Now: "What are the 15 things different people need to know, and how do I make sure it's all there?"

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The skill shifts from compression to organization. From simplification to structure. From presenting to enabling.

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My POV: The window is open right now

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Most organizations are still compressing. Still optimizing for brevity. Which means right now, there's a genuine competitive advantage in going the other direction.

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Your prospects are already using AI to research you. They're asking Claude and ChatGPT to compare your approach with competitors, evaluate your fit, assess your thinking. When they do, what does the AI find? If your competitor has published comprehensive, high-resolution thinking and you've published compressed marketing copy, the AI will give better, more substantive answers about them. Not because their solution is better, because their corpus is richer.

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This isn't about being verbose or padding content. Every section should contain information someone actually needs. The goal is completeness and high resolution, providing complete thinking that AI can help different people extract different value from.

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But here's what I believe: The companies that understand this shift first will win in ways that aren't immediately visible. Their AI-assisted prospects will get better answers. Their strategic initiatives will achieve clearer alignment across diverse stakeholders. Their proposals will address concerns they never knew existed.

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The past 20 years rewarded compression. The next 20 will reward completeness. And we're at the inflection point right now.