At some point every company in the world became thrilled to announce something.

Nobody was pleased. Nobody simply had news. They were thrilled. Thrilled to announce a strategic partnership. Thrilled to unveil a refreshed brand identity. Thrilled to embark on a transformative journey toward customer-centric innovation.

The employees reading the announcement were often discovering the transformation at the same time as LinkedIn.

Corporate slop existed long before generative AI. In fact, corporate language may have been spiritually prepared for it.

A sentence designed to survive

Good writing usually risks something. It chooses a noun. It names the problem. It says who did what and occasionally admits that a thing did not work.

Corporate slop survives by doing the opposite.

It is communication engineered to pass through legal, marketing, leadership, human resources, and the nervous executive who would like the word “problem” changed to “opportunity.” By the time everyone is comfortable, the sentence has the nutritional profile of packing foam.

Nothing is technically wrong with it.

Nothing is technically in it.

Then came the machine that had read all of LinkedIn

Generative AI did not create the condition. It recognized the pattern.

This is what makes corporate writing such fertile ground for synthetic language. The templates were already there: the humble-brag opening, the three abstract nouns, the promise to “continue driving impact,” the paragraph thanking an incredible team for an accomplishment nobody has yet described.

The machine does not need to flatten the voice because the voice arrived pre-flattened.

Ask for a professional announcement and you can receive a perfectly respectable paragraph that sounds like it was approved by twelve people who have never met.

Which, to be fair, is also how many professional announcements are made.

The problem is not jargon

Every profession has jargon. Surgeons, electricians, designers, programmers, lawyers, mechanics, and seventeen-year-olds on Discord all develop language that helps insiders speak precisely.

Corporate slop is different because it often uses language to avoid precision.

“Optimization” can mean cutting staff. “Transformation” can mean replacing software. “Alignment” can mean the boss has decided. “Community” can mean customers. “Authenticity” can mean the brand team has scheduled a post that says “we’re keeping it real.”

The words are not meaningless individually. They become meaningless through protective overuse.

Why it matters

It is tempting to treat this as harmless office comedy, and often it is. Nobody needs a congressional inquiry into a bad all-hands email.

But language shapes what an organization is capable of admitting to itself.

If layoffs are always “rightsizing,” failure is always “learning,” surveillance is always “personalization,” and every unpopular decision is part of a “journey,” eventually the language stops describing reality and starts cushioning people from it.

That is slop doing what slop does best: filling the space where meaning was supposed to go.

Write like somebody is going to read it

The cure is embarrassingly old-fashioned.

Name the thing. Use the concrete word. Say what changed. Say why. Cut the sentence that could appear in a press release for a bank, a yogurt company, and a military contractor without modification.

And perhaps most radically, stop being thrilled.

You are allowed to simply announce it.