Guest articles are one of the more reliable ways a publication like ours can surface perspective that doesn't come from inside a newsroom-the view of someone who has actually built, deployed, funded, or regulated AI systems, rather than only written about them. But the quality of guest submissions varies enormously, and a consistent pattern separates the pitches worth publishing from the ones that don't add much.
The general-take problem
The most common weak pitch offers a broad opinion on where AI is headed as an industry-optimistic or skeptical, in general terms-without grounding that opinion in the author's specific, verifiable experience. These pieces are easy to write and hard to differentiate from the dozens of similar general takes already published elsewhere, and they rarely tell a reader something they couldn't have guessed from the author's general professional background alone.
What a strong pitch looks like instead
The guest pitches we're most interested in come from a specific, hard-won position: a founder describing a particular deployment decision that didn't work and what they learned from it, an operator explaining a specific tradeoff they had to make between speed and reliability, a researcher describing a specific gap between what a technique promises in a paper and what it actually delivers in production. Specificity, grounded in the author's own direct experience, is what makes a guest piece worth a reader's time over a general opinion they could get from many other sources.
Disclosure and independence
Because guest authors often have a professional or financial stake in the topics they're writing about, we ask for clear disclosure of any relevant interest-whether the author's company builds a competing product, stands to benefit from a particular regulatory outcome, or has another material stake in the argument being made. This doesn't disqualify a pitch, but it needs to be visible to readers evaluating the argument.
How to pitch us
If you have a specific, first-hand account of an AI decision that went well or badly, grounded in real experience rather than general commentary, we want to hear about it-details are on our Write for Us page.