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Wessel Janse van Rensburg, founder of Retorik
Why I built it

For three years I ran the public writing of one of Europe’s most high-profile business leaders — her posts, her blog, some of her speeches. I know how hard it is to put someone else’s ideas into words she would own; the colleagues who each have a view on the draft; the reply from the departure lounge; and the question that comes afterwards. Retorik is the tool I wanted then.

I have been building with AI for a year, and writing with it for longer. One thing became clear: even with a model as powerful as Fable, the best creative decisions are still mine. So I don’t try to do anything in one shot. I build in steps, and steer the whole way.

Then, this spring, I read Arvind Narayanan’s “What will be left for us to work on?” It became my manifesto for why I built Retorik the way I did.

— Wessel Janse van Rensburg, founder

Why I built Retorik the way I did

The wheel,
not the oars.

When machines take over the rowing, the human moves to the wheel.

That is the best one-line summary of what is happening to knowledge work. Drafting — the rowing — is work a machine can now do well, provided it has learned from the real thing. What it cannot do is know what you think, decide what deserves saying, and judge whether a post is worth your name.

That work stays with the writer. Retorik is built around it. The rest goes.

i.
The creativity

Your views are the asset.

Machines remix what exists. The surprising connection, the position nobody else would take, the judgment call under uncertainty — these remain human ground. For an executive, that is good news dressed as a limitation: your views are the asset.

Generic tools paper over that asset with fluent filler. The same cadence, the same hedged optimism, the same unmistakable smell of generated text — everyone sounding like the same machine. In an institution where public words carry consequence, that is not merely dull. It is a liability.

Retorik takes the opposite bet. It learns from what you have actually written and said — speeches, letters, posts, memos — and it keeps two things deliberately separate: what you believe, extracted from the record, and how you sound, your cadence and habits. Drafts are built from your real positions, in your real register.

The creativity in a Retorik post is yours. The machine’s job is to get it onto the page faster.

ii.
The effort

Your effort shifts — it doesn’t disappear.

Here is what actually changes: your words no longer have to arrive finished.

Some days you write — a rough paragraph typed between meetings, because writing is how you think. Retorik shapes it into something presentable, in your register, at the press of a button. Other days you start from a draft that already argues what you argue, and rule on it. Sharpen this line. Cut that claim. Not this week. Send it back with a note. Approve it.

That is not a reduced role. It is the senior role — what leaders already do with a trusted speechwriter: the drafting is delegated, the judgment never is. Retorik’s whole workflow is shaped around the judging. Your comms team may check every channel’s version. You still have the final word. Every decision is recorded. Nothing goes out without a person choosing to send it.

The EU’s AI Act points the same way. Where it requires AI-generated text to be disclosed, it exempts text a human has reviewed and someone is editorially responsible for. The approval record is that responsibility, written down.

The grind goes. The thinking stays. So does the last word.

iii.
The collaboration

Co-creators, not replacements.

There are three stories about what AI does to work: that it does nothing useful at all — or, at the other pole, that it is so capable it replaces people. And there is a third: that it can amplify us, by making human taste and decisions a bigger part of work. Retorik is built for the third story.

The right image for this kind of tool is Arvind Narayanan’s crane operator: the machine does the heavy lifting, the person stays in control — and together they reach heights neither manages alone.

Retorik is that shape of tool, deliberately. It drafts with the leader and the comms team, never instead of them. And the collaboration compounds: every post that survives review and gets published feeds back into the voice library. Each judgment you make — the comms check, the edit, the final approval — becomes material the system learns from.

That accumulated taste is the working asset. No competitor can copy it, because it is made of your decisions about your words.

The rowing-and-steering frame is owed to Arvind Narayanan’s incisive 2026 ICML keynote, “What will be left for us to work on?”

The division of labour

The machine drafts. You steer.
Every decision makes it better.

That is Retorik: your ideas, in your voice — shaped into a post in minutes, with a record of who stood behind every word.

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