I keep getting asked about this in fit calls, in DMs, at dinners with other operators. What’s your take on AI right now? Are the brands using it winning? Losing? Both?
Here’s the honest read from inside the work, with a slate of brands I’m watching closely and a fair number I’ve been hands-on with. It’s not the version you’ll see in a McKinsey deck or a LinkedIn manifesto. It’s what I’m actually seeing across the creative work, day to day.
The Quick Version: The brands using AI well aren’t doing more with it. They’re doing less, better. They use AI for the parts that don’t require taste, and keep human judgment on the parts that do. The brands losing ground are using AI for more output without realizing volume without point of view is what makes a brand generic at scale.
If you’re a founder figuring out where AI belongs in your brand work, this piece is for you. Not as a list of tools. As a pattern read from a creative director who’s been inside campaigns where AI helped and inside ones where it quietly hurt.
What I’m Seeing on the Winning Side
Three patterns, consistently.
They have a real point of view first. The brands using AI well have positioning that was already sharp before AI showed up. They knew who they were for, what they were saying, and what they refused to do. AI accelerates the execution. It doesn’t replace the decisions.
I worked with a national wellness brand on a launch where we built almost the entire image library with AI before the physical packaging was finalized. It worked. Not because the AI was good (it was fine), but because the brand direction was locked. We knew exactly what we were prompting for, why each shot mattered, and what we’d reject if it came back wrong. AI was the production lever. The strategy was the spine. Without the spine, the same prompts would have produced expensive sameness.
They use AI to widen the funnel of options, not narrow the work. Smart operators are using AI to generate twenty concept directions in an afternoon. Then they spend the rest of the week killing nineteen of them. The taste is in the killing, not the generating.
McKinsey’s recent research on agentic AI in marketing names this directly: humans focus on tasks like developing marketing strategies based on qualitative factors like taste that aren’t prone to automation, while agents handle the generation and the early vetting. The frame I’d add from the work: it’s not that humans are better at taste than AI. It’s that taste is a brand asset, and outsourcing it dissolves the brand.
They protect the surfaces where trust gets built. The brands I respect aren’t using AI for the moments that matter most. Founder-led video. Real customer stories. Email from a name a customer recognizes. The hero shot on a launch. They use AI for the surrounding work (concept exploration, retouching, mock-ups, variants, secondary photography), and they keep human judgment on the surfaces where the brand earns belief.
What I’m Seeing on the Losing Side
Three patterns there too, and they’re noisier.
More content, less point of view. The most common pattern I’m watching. A founder reads that AI lets them produce ten times more output. They produce ten times more output. Six months in, engagement is flat, save rate is down, and the brand reads as algorithmic. AI didn’t break the brand. The brand had a positioning problem that AI made louder.
Audience-detectable AI on trust-sensitive surfaces. A growing one, and it stings. Customers can tell when the founder photo on the about page is AI. They can tell when the testimonial copy is a little too symmetrical. They can tell when the homepage hero is a Midjourney render with the brand’s product roughly composited in. The brand looks polished. The trust quietly erodes.
The McKinsey-cited eMarketer data on this is sharp: when consumers notice AI-generated content, they’re meaningfully more likely to trust the brand less than more. The asymmetry matters. The downside is bigger than the upside. Which means the question isn’t "can I get away with this AI asset," it’s "what happens to my brand the first time a customer notices."
AI used as a substitute for strategic decision-making. The most expensive version. A founder uses an AI brand-in-a-box tool to generate a brand identity. The tool produces something polished and plausible. The founder commits. A year later, the brand looks like every other brand the same tool produced for somebody else. The investment was small. The opportunity cost (the year spent looking like everyone else) was not.
This one breaks my heart a little, because the founders doing this are usually scrappy, smart, and trying to be responsible with money. The tool isn’t the problem. The tool used in place of a decision is.
What’s Quietly Different About 2026
A few things I’m noticing this year that I wasn’t noticing in 2024 or 2025.
The aesthetic ceiling on AI has risen. Image generation in particular has gotten genuinely good. A skilled operator with the right prompting workflow can produce work that’s hard to distinguish from a mid-tier commercial shoot. That’s the new floor.
Which means the differentiator has moved up the stack. When everyone has access to the same level of execution, the part that’s left is judgment. What to shoot. Who to feature. What to leave out. What to refuse. That’s not AI work. That’s brand work.
Brands are starting to publish less, on purpose. The smartest operators I’m watching are running tighter feeds, fewer posts, more considered work. AI didn’t make them produce more. It freed them to focus on the few things that compound. The ones still chasing volume are losing ground to the ones choosing restraint.
The audience is getting better at spotting AI. Three years ago, a customer might not have noticed an AI image. Now they often do, and they form a snap judgment about brand integrity from it. The brands using AI on the wrong surfaces are paying a trust tax they can’t always see.
The CMOs who said "we’ll never use AI" are quietly using it. And the ones who said "we’re going all-in on AI" are quietly pulling back. The middle path is winning: AI everywhere it doesn’t touch judgment, human everywhere it does.
The brands quietly winning the next two years aren’t the ones using the most AI. They’re the ones who decided what AI is allowed to touch before they let it touch anything.
What I’d Tell a Founder Reading This
A few things I find myself saying in fit calls right now, over and over.
Lock your positioning first. AI amplifies whatever you bring to it. Sharp positioning gets sharper. Weak positioning gets noisier and faster, which is worse than weak and slow. If you haven’t decided what you stand for, AI isn’t going to help. It might actively hurt.
Use AI for the parts that don’t require taste. Variants of a hero shot you’ve already directed. Mockups of packaging for review. Backgrounds for product PDP. Copy variations for testing. Anywhere the creative call has already been made, AI is a force multiplier. Use it.
Don’t use AI on the surfaces that need belief. Your founder portrait. Customer testimonials. Hero campaign shots. Anywhere your brand earns trust, the cost-benefit on AI is wrong. Save the budget, hire a photographer, shoot real people, write your own emails.
Keep a human in the loop on every release. I keep meeting founders who are running AI workflows with no review step. The work goes from prompt to publish. That’s how brand voice drifts inside three months. Put a human in the loop, even if it’s just you, even if it’s just for ten minutes.
Notice what your customers say. If a customer DMs you to ask whether a photo on your site is real, that’s information. Not embarrassment, information. The brand is showing them a seam you didn’t know was visible. Listen to it.
What I Watch For in Brand Audits Right Now
When I do a fit call or run a Brand Jump, AI is now one of the things I’m looking at. Not as a tool review. As a diagnostic for whether the brand has taste underneath the execution.
The questions I’m asking myself when I look at someone’s brand:
- Does this look like one of a thousand AI-generated brands using the same prompts, or does it look like something only this founder could have made?
- Where has AI replaced a judgment call that should still belong to a human?
- Is the brand using AI to compound its point of view or to disguise the absence of one?
- If we removed every AI-touched asset right now, what’s left? Is the brand still legible?
That last question is the cleanest test. The brands with answers have used AI well. The brands that come apart when you take away the AI never built a brand in the first place.
If you’re sitting with the sense that AI is doing too much of the heavy lifting in your brand right now, that’s worth a real conversation. Happy to dig in if any of this is landing. My DMs are open, and the Brand Jump is the front door if you want to take this deeper than a comment thread.
