AI Makes Professional Polish Easier and Real Expertise More Valuable
You can sound incredibly knowledgeable and thoughtful about a subject or topic in an email, but can you back that up over a Zoom chat or in a face-to-face meeting?
Trey Shores
Principal and co-founder
Trey Shores
AI can make a first-year associate sound like a CFO in an email. Zoom is less forgiving. When the follow-up question lands and the polished language has to become a live answer, borrowed confidence starts to show. The professionals who stand out treat AI’s first draft as raw material, then do the harder work of understanding it well enough to defend it in the room.
Trey Shores has spent more than 14 years evaluating partners and building hotel real estate brands across global markets. As Principal and Co-Founder of Pied-à-Terre, he structures capital partnerships and pitches design-led, extended-stay developments. He previously served as Ace Hotel’s Asia-Pacific representative, playing a key role in projects such as Ace Hotel Kyoto, in collaboration with architect Kengo Kuma and Japan’s largest real estate developer, NTT Fudosan. In high-stakes dealmaking, investment decisions and long-term partnerships turn on trust. Curatorial taste and an authentic professional voice are what’s actually being sold.
“You can sound incredibly knowledgeable and thoughtful about a subject or topic in an email, but can you back that up over a Zoom chat or in a face-to-face meeting?” For Shores, the red flags go up when people outsource their relationships to an algorithm. Pitch decks and boilerplate can carry generic language without anyone noticing. Direct correspondence is different. The absence of context and familiarity gives the sender away. If an old friend can spot frictionless, robotic language instantly, a seasoned investor or potential partner definitely will.
The middle-school email test
“I don’t see it so much in pitch decks and collateral, but I can see it from a mile away when AI has completely written an email or a LinkedIn post. A good friend of mine wanted to collaborate on a project, and he sent me an email proposal that was 100% AI-produced, including a sign-off that said, ‘I look forward to working with you on what will surely be a rewarding experience.’ I was like, bro, we went to middle school together. What’s with the AI email? So I called him out on it. He said he was just being lazy, and was then a bit embarrassed.”
That instinct, the ability to feel when something is off, is exactly what managers are now trying to assess in early-career talent. When everyone can produce a clean draft, distinguishing real capability from prompt-deep competence becomes harder, and it complicates everything from the hiring process to day-to-day accountability. The catch is that junior staff often can’t spot when the machine is wrong. A live meeting is a brutal place to find out.
Embrace the friction
“The worst thing someone can do, at any age, is take whatever copy AI spits out and use it wholesale without double or triple checking every word and pushing back on anything that seems off. The trouble is, if someone is just starting out in a field, they may not have enough experience to sense when something is off. There is no substitute for rolling up one’s sleeves and learning everything you can.”
Rather than waiting for someone else to solve this, Shores favors an active, skeptical relationship with the technology. Treating AI drafts as material to question rather than accept is what builds expertise over time. That instinct aligns with how strong judgment actually develops in this environment and with what the best AI users do differently. Shores applies the same scrutiny to his own work at Pied-à-Terre, whether he’s preparing investor materials or project pitches.
Let AI give you the clay
“I would encourage people starting out to use AI as a teaching tool. Let’s say you have to prepare a report on something you don’t fully understand or that’s new to you. Go ahead and make that report with AI and then take the time to go through it line by line and make sure you understand everything. Do this every time. Ask questions, push back. Use every encounter with AI as a learning experience.” That same scrutiny doesn’t go away with senior work. It just gets pointed at different problems.
“I currently use AI like this. Let’s say I need to do a blurb for a pitch deck. For example, I am writing about the fit for a hotel product in a given market or city. I might use AI to generate a couple of paragraphs. Then I go through maybe a dozen revisions of that text until I have distilled it into my voice and what I think it should be saying. So let AI give you the clay. You need to then shape it into what speaks for you.”
The other test is reading the room. When algorithms handle entire messages, the result tends to feel generic and detached, missing the warmth that actually builds trust. Sometimes it edges into unintentional misrepresentation when senders come across more polished or more distant than they intend. Warmth and timing are what close deals, and neither one starts from a prompt window.
You can’t prompt a pulse
“Be human and warm in your communications. If it’s Friday, say ‘Have a nice weekend.’ If it’s late, say ‘Enjoy your evening’ as you sign off an email. Simple things like this go a long way. You also have to read the room. A balance of professional decorum and making a personal connection is a skill in itself, and it’s one AI will never replicate, because it requires actually caring about the person on the other end. That’s not something you can prompt your way into,” says Shores.
The professionals who stand out in this environment aren’t the ones with the cleanest output. They’re the ones whose judgment and warmth hold up the moment the screen turns on.
Related articles
TL;DR
Trey Shores
Trey Shores
Principal and co-founder
Principal and co-founder
AI can make a first-year associate sound like a CFO in an email. Zoom is less forgiving. When the follow-up question lands and the polished language has to become a live answer, borrowed confidence starts to show. The professionals who stand out treat AI’s first draft as raw material, then do the harder work of understanding it well enough to defend it in the room.
Trey Shores has spent more than 14 years evaluating partners and building hotel real estate brands across global markets. As Principal and Co-Founder of Pied-à-Terre, he structures capital partnerships and pitches design-led, extended-stay developments. He previously served as Ace Hotel’s Asia-Pacific representative, playing a key role in projects such as Ace Hotel Kyoto, in collaboration with architect Kengo Kuma and Japan’s largest real estate developer, NTT Fudosan. In high-stakes dealmaking, investment decisions and long-term partnerships turn on trust. Curatorial taste and an authentic professional voice are what’s actually being sold.
“You can sound incredibly knowledgeable and thoughtful about a subject or topic in an email, but can you back that up over a Zoom chat or in a face-to-face meeting?” For Shores, the red flags go up when people outsource their relationships to an algorithm. Pitch decks and boilerplate can carry generic language without anyone noticing. Direct correspondence is different. The absence of context and familiarity gives the sender away. If an old friend can spot frictionless, robotic language instantly, a seasoned investor or potential partner definitely will.
The middle-school email test
“I don’t see it so much in pitch decks and collateral, but I can see it from a mile away when AI has completely written an email or a LinkedIn post. A good friend of mine wanted to collaborate on a project, and he sent me an email proposal that was 100% AI-produced, including a sign-off that said, ‘I look forward to working with you on what will surely be a rewarding experience.’ I was like, bro, we went to middle school together. What’s with the AI email? So I called him out on it. He said he was just being lazy, and was then a bit embarrassed.”
That instinct, the ability to feel when something is off, is exactly what managers are now trying to assess in early-career talent. When everyone can produce a clean draft, distinguishing real capability from prompt-deep competence becomes harder, and it complicates everything from the hiring process to day-to-day accountability. The catch is that junior staff often can’t spot when the machine is wrong. A live meeting is a brutal place to find out.
Embrace the friction
“The worst thing someone can do, at any age, is take whatever copy AI spits out and use it wholesale without double or triple checking every word and pushing back on anything that seems off. The trouble is, if someone is just starting out in a field, they may not have enough experience to sense when something is off. There is no substitute for rolling up one’s sleeves and learning everything you can.”
Rather than waiting for someone else to solve this, Shores favors an active, skeptical relationship with the technology. Treating AI drafts as material to question rather than accept is what builds expertise over time. That instinct aligns with how strong judgment actually develops in this environment and with what the best AI users do differently. Shores applies the same scrutiny to his own work at Pied-à-Terre, whether he’s preparing investor materials or project pitches.
Let AI give you the clay
“I would encourage people starting out to use AI as a teaching tool. Let’s say you have to prepare a report on something you don’t fully understand or that’s new to you. Go ahead and make that report with AI and then take the time to go through it line by line and make sure you understand everything. Do this every time. Ask questions, push back. Use every encounter with AI as a learning experience.” That same scrutiny doesn’t go away with senior work. It just gets pointed at different problems.
“I currently use AI like this. Let’s say I need to do a blurb for a pitch deck. For example, I am writing about the fit for a hotel product in a given market or city. I might use AI to generate a couple of paragraphs. Then I go through maybe a dozen revisions of that text until I have distilled it into my voice and what I think it should be saying. So let AI give you the clay. You need to then shape it into what speaks for you.”
The other test is reading the room. When algorithms handle entire messages, the result tends to feel generic and detached, missing the warmth that actually builds trust. Sometimes it edges into unintentional misrepresentation when senders come across more polished or more distant than they intend. Warmth and timing are what close deals, and neither one starts from a prompt window.
You can’t prompt a pulse
“Be human and warm in your communications. If it’s Friday, say ‘Have a nice weekend.’ If it’s late, say ‘Enjoy your evening’ as you sign off an email. Simple things like this go a long way. You also have to read the room. A balance of professional decorum and making a personal connection is a skill in itself, and it’s one AI will never replicate, because it requires actually caring about the person on the other end. That’s not something you can prompt your way into,” says Shores.
The professionals who stand out in this environment aren’t the ones with the cleanest output. They’re the ones whose judgment and warmth hold up the moment the screen turns on.