Brand Leadership in the AI Era: What Will Matter Next
Brands aren’t an invention of marketing departments. They’ve existed since people began to trade. In antiquity, artisans marked their products to make origin and quality visible. In the industrial age, the brand became an instrument of differentiation. Later, a symbol of lifestyle, attitude, and belonging. Today, brands are platforms that enable dialogue and convey values.
Now we stand at a threshold: artificial intelligence is changing the rules. Much of what has shaped brand leadership for decades can suddenly be automated. Content is created at the push of a button, campaigns optimize themselves, audiences are addressed in real time. Mark Zuckerberg goes further: his vision is a future in which companies specify only goal and budget, and AI does the rest.
Sounds like the end of brand leadership.
In fact, it’s its stress test.
Kim Notz
23. September 2025
Experience: from staged moments to a learning system
“Customer experience” isn’t a new term. But AI elevates it to another level. Until now, experience was a staged journey: campaigns that looked the same to everyone; websites that worked according to the same pattern.
With AI, experience becomes radically personalized. Every interaction can differ: one person gets a humorous tone, another a factual one. Offers, visuals—even entire services—adapt in real time.
This turns experience into a learning system—constantly in flux, never the same. That’s precisely why brand leadership is needed. Not to control the system, but to define guardrails: which values are non‑negotiable?
What feeling should arise despite all the variation?
Without this framework, experience risks becoming arbitrary—perfectly personalized and simultaneously completely interchangeable.
Authenticity becomes a luxury
If AI can stage everything, the longing for what’s real grows. Authenticity has long been a powerful differentiator. In the AI era, it becomes a prerequisite. What once counted as a sympathetic bonus becomes a survival strategy.
Authentic isn’t whoever seems most human, but whoever remains transparent. Where does the product come from? How is it made? Where is AI used—and why? Those who answer these questions openly earn trust.
In a world where every brand is technically able to address me perfectly, it’s no longer the quality of the staging that decides, but the credibility of the core.
If AI can create perfect fake realities, the real becomes the ultimate premium feature. But authentic isn’t whoever seems perfect—it’s whoever is unmistakable. Brands that don’t try to sound pleasing, but have a recognizable voice. Brands with quirks you love or reject, but never ignore. With stories they don’t copy, but can only tell themselves. The difference will no longer be decided by polished surface, but by lived substance. AI can imitate any stylistic device, but it can’t develop intuition. It can analyze trends, but it can’t have a vision. It can optimize interactions, but it can’t build a relationship. That’s why the strongest brands of the future will be those that understand their human uniqueness as a superpower—and treat stance as the one difference you can’t program.
When the brand itself is AI
Perhaps the most exciting question is this: what if the brand itself is AI‑generated? Not just using tools, but existing as a system that hyper‑personalizes in real time?
Then there is no longer the one brand, but millions of individual versions. Classical brand leadership, which aims for consistency, no longer holds.
The task shifts: away from securing external uniformity, toward defining an inner compass. Brand leadership means setting principles and values so clearly that they shine through even when everything else varies. It’s not rigidity that creates distinctiveness, but stance.
Zuckerberg’s vision: threat or liberation?
Zuckerberg’s scenario—goal in, budget in, result out—devalues routine. Agencies still busy with media plans and campaign execution lose significance.
But it’s also a liberation. Where technology takes over, space remains for what machines cannot do: give meaning. Assume responsibility. Show stance.
Brand leadership thus doesn’t become superfluous—it becomes more relevant. It no longer decides the “how” of a campaign, but the “why” behind it. About what remains when technology equalizes everything else.
The historical thread
A wider view may help. Brands have always emerged when people needed orientation:
• In ancient trade as a guarantee of authenticity.
• In industrialization as a promise of quality.
• In the consumer society as a symbol of lifestyle.
• In globalization as a platform for dialogue and values.
Today, in the AI era, people need orientation again. Not because products are missing, but because they sink beneath an abundance of possibilities. AI can calculate everything, but it doesn’t answer the question: what do we actually stand for?
This is exactly where brand leadership starts a new.
What’s new about it? Not the vocabulary, but the context in which it counts. Stance, authenticity, clarity—these were never wrong. But now they’re non‑negotiable. Because AI can stage everything, the real becomes the only distinction. Because everything is scalable, the unmistakable becomes the last bastion. And because technology equalizes everything, the human core becomes the strategic superpower. Brand leadership isn’t replaced; it’s recalibrated.
