The Human Advantage: Branding in an AI-Dominated Future

Trite but no less true, the rise of AI is a revolution that’s about to change everything, including the field of brand marketing.

How exactly? At this early stage, it’s probably too soon to say.

Though, among all the hype and conjecture, there’s one hunch I’m finding particularly hard to shake.

It’s slightly paradoxical, and could well be proven wrong. But here it is.

🔮 In an AI-dominated world, it’s the brands with a genuine human touch that will prevail.

Allow me to elaborate by first quickly outlining what a brand really is.

A brand acts as the intermediary between two groups of humans: business folk and their consumers.

By extension, brand building is — in part, at least — a process whereby business folk continuously signal their professional prowess (often in quite resource-demanding ways) which encourages consumers to trust and try their products or services.

But now, with the growing prevalence of AI tools, businesses’ traditional methods of showcasing their expertise are about to be significantly reduced.

For instance, a flawlessly executed brand identity has long been a proxy for a business’s professional competence. But with the incredible copywriting* and design abilities of AI, this loses its potency.

The same goes for AI’s ever-improving capacity to aggregate, analyse and explain complex information, previously a reliable mark of a business’s subject-matter proficiency. Alas, no longer.

What’s more, the ruthless diagnostic and executional strength of AI is going to allow businesses to influence consumer behaviour — for maximal profits — more easily than ever.

And I’m sure we can all imagine scenarios where managers are tempted to let AI operate unsupervised, identifying and exploiting opportunities by any means possible — ethical or otherwise.

So, in a world where everything is polished and robots are potentially running amok, I believe consumers will increasingly seek assurance that the humans in charge of such powerful tools are of the highest integrity.