AI can build you a brand. It just can't build you a standout one.

On taste, generic beauty, and the one thing no tool can generate for you.

Last month a founder sent me her new brand identity. Logo, colour palette, font pairing, brand voice guidelines. All generated in an afternoon. All technically correct.

I couldn't tell you what she sold (we’re under Chatham House Rule…)

This brand wasn't bad. The typography was clean, the palette was on trend, the tone of voice doc used the word "elevated" four times, which, fine, we've all done it. The problem wasn't quality. The problem was that I'd seen this exact brand before. Slightly different name, same soul. Or rather, same absence of one. That's what nobody tells you about AI branding tools. They are not bad at their job. They're excellent at it. Give any of them a brief and they'll hand you back something coherent, something shippable, something that would have taken a studio two weeks to produce a decade ago. I use these tools constantly. Adobe Firefly lives in my daily workflow. I am not writing this as someone who fears the machine.

I'm writing it as someone who spends her days looking at what it makes.

Here's what I've noticed. AI is trained on what already exists. That's not a criticism, it's just the mechanics of it. It’s how they train the models. So when you ask it to build you a brand, it reaches for the average of every beautiful brand it has ever seen, and it hands you back the mean. Smooth, tasteful, and instantly forgettable. It gives you competence. It cannot give you a point of view, because a point of view requires having lived something the model hasn't.

A standout brand isn't the average of good taste. It's a specific, sometimes uncomfortable choice that only makes sense once you understand the person or the story behind it. The founder who insists on an ugly-but-honest colour because it's the exact shade of the kitchen she grew up cooking in. The tone of voice that sounds a little combative because the brand exists to pick a fight and disrupt an entire industry. The logo that shouldn't work on paper and somehow works because it's stubborn in exactly the right way.

None of that comes from a prompt. It comes from a brief that starts with "tell me the thing you haven't said out loud yet" and doesn't stop until you actually answer it.

I think this is the real fork in the road right now. AI has closed the gap between "no brand" and "decent brand" almost completely, which is genuinely good news, especially for founders who couldn't previously afford a studio. But it has also widened the gap between "decent" and "standout," because now decent is the baseline everyone starts from. The bar didn't disappear. It moved. Standing out used to mean being better than the studio down the road or quite often reserved for the big industry giants. Now it means being unmistakably, specifically yourself in a sea of very competent sameness, which is essential for survival as a business.

So the work I actually do with clients now has almost nothing to do with the tools and everything to do with the excavation before them. What do you actually believe that your competitors would never say out loud. What's the version of your brand that makes you slightly nervous to publish. Where are you being tasteful when you should be being true. Get that right first, and the tools become extraordinary. Skip it, and the tools just help you produce a very polished version of nothing in particular.

AI didn't kill brand strategy. It killed the version of brand strategy that was really just template selection dressed up as craft. What's left, the part that was always the actual job, is harder to fake than ever.

So here's what I'm curious about. When you look at the brands you've built or worked on, be honest: is there a choice in there that couldn't have come from anywhere but you? Or is it, underneath the polish, just like everything else you've seen?

I'd genuinely like to know.

Teresa