A few things happened in 2023 and 2024 that changed how I think about organizational websites, probably permanently.
First: generative AI made the bad-website problem worse. Not because AI built bad websites, but because AI gave every organization an excuse to produce more content faster and dump it online without any real editorial judgment. I spent a good chunk of last year reviewing websites — the kind of audit work that reveals years of accumulated digital clutter — and what I kept finding was the same problem in different costumes: too much content, too little architecture, and almost no coherent sense of what a visitor was actually supposed to do.
Second: a lot of organizations, especially nonprofits and multilateral institutions, looked at what OpenAI and Google were doing and decided the answer to their bloated websites was to bolt on a chatbot. Replace navigation with a search box. Let the AI figure it out. I understand the appeal. I’ve also seen how it plays out in practice, and the results are — let’s say — mixed.
Here’s my issue with the “just add AI” approach to digital: it treats the symptom, not the disease. If your content is poorly structured, inconsistently tagged, and spread across a decade’s worth of pages that no one has touched since the Obama administration, a chatbot isn’t going to redeem it. It’s going to hallucinate confidently and point users toward a PDF from 2011.
The harder work — the work that organizations keep deferring — is the governance work. Who owns this content? What’s the threshold for publishing something new versus updating something old? What actually gets retired, and when? These aren’t glamorous questions. They don’t get discussed at leadership retreats. But they are the questions that determine whether your website is useful or just technically operational.
What I find myself saying to clients a lot these days: AI is a legitimate tool for content at scale, but it doesn’t replace judgment. Someone still has to decide what belongs on the website and what doesn’t. Someone still has to think about the user, not the org chart. Someone still has to be willing to kill content that someone senior created three years ago and is emotionally attached to.
That person, in my experience, is usually the most exhausted one in the room. But they’re almost always right.