The Business Cost of Synthetic Content: Why Companies Should Care

The Scale of the Problem

Synthetic content is not just a consumer problem. It is a business problem measured in billions of dollars. According to Deloitte, fraud losses facilitated by generative AI in the United States are projected to climb from $12.3 billion in 2023 to nearly $40 billion by 2027.

For businesses, the threats are diverse and growing.

Fake Reviews: A $152 Billion Problem

Online reviews influence $152 billion in global spending annually, according to the World Economic Forum. An estimated 4% of all online reviews are fraudulent, and AI has made generating convincing fake reviews trivially easy.

The impact goes both ways:

• Competitors flooding your listings with negative fake reviews can tank sales overnight
• Fake positive reviews for competing products mislead your potential customers
• AI-generated review farms can produce thousands of convincing reviews in hours

Amazon, Google, and Yelp are all fighting this battle, but the volume of AI-generated reviews is outpacing their detection capabilities.

AI Phishing: $4.8 Million Per Breach

Phishing attacks powered by AI are more sophisticated than ever. In 2024, the average cost of a phishing-related data breach was $4.8 million per organization.

AI makes phishing more dangerous because it can:

• Generate personalized emails that reference real company events and employee names
• Mimic the writing style of specific executives
• Produce grammatically perfect messages in any language
• Scale attacks across thousands of targets simultaneously

The days of spotting phishing by looking for typos are over.

Deepfake Executive Fraud

In early 2024, an employee at engineering firm Arup was tricked into transferring over $25 million after a video call with deepfakes of company executives. The employee believed they were on a legitimate call with the CFO and other colleagues. Every person on the call was a deepfake.

This is not an isolated incident. Voice cloning technology from companies like ElevenLabs can replicate a person's voice from just a few seconds of audio. A single voicemail or conference recording is enough to create a convincing clone.

Synthetic Candidates in Hiring

A growing threat that most companies are not prepared for: AI-generated job candidates. Using deepfake video for interviews and AI-generated resumes, bad actors are infiltrating companies to steal data, intellectual property, or simply collect paychecks.

A single security breach caused by a malicious synthetic candidate can cost a company up to $500,000, according to HR research.

AI-Generated Proposals and Content

On the less dramatic but still costly end, businesses are dealing with:

• Vendors submitting AI-generated proposals that sound impressive but lack substance
• Employees using AI to produce work that contains hallucinated facts or plagiarized content
• Marketing content that is generic, off-brand, or factually incorrect because it was generated without oversight

What Companies Should Do

1. Implement detection tools in your content review pipeline. Tools like Copyleaks and Originality.ai can flag AI-generated text in proposals, applications, and communications.

2. Train employees to recognize deepfake video and voice cloning attempts. Establish verification protocols for financial transactions.

3. Monitor your online reputation for fake reviews and AI-generated content about your brand.

4. Update your security policies to account for AI-powered phishing and social engineering.

5. Establish AI usage policies for employees that define acceptable use and require disclosure.

The Bottom Line

The cost of ignoring synthetic content is measured in millions. The cost of preparing for it is a fraction of that. Companies that invest in detection, training, and policy now will be far better positioned than those that wait for the first incident.