AI is changing how brands get made and how people buy. Both sides are getting automated. What makes a brand matter when everything gets easier, faster, and cheaper?
These creates new tensions.
- Seamlessness vs. Friction: You can make everything seamless. But seamless is invisible.
- Perfection vs. Authenticity: You can make everything polished. But polish means little.
- Control vs. Co-creation: You can control every touchpoint. But people trust other people, not brands.
Each one pulls in two directions. The job is finding the right balance and making it repeatable.
Let's get into each one.
Seamlessness vs. Friction
Most tedious tasks will get automated. As of 2026, over half of searches go through AI systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity. AI agents research products, compare options, and make recommendations for you.
Making things smooth and easy has never been simpler. AI can personalize every step of the customer experience.
But there's a catch. When everything flows perfectly, you disappear. You become a utility nobody thinks about.
So how do you stand out when everything is automated?
You add friction back in, but only the kind that makes people feel something.
Good friction helps customers see themselves differently. It gives them something they'd actually miss if you took it away. There's a difference between a pop-up asking you to rate your last purchase and a prompt asking what you're training for. Both add a step but only one matters.
Perfection vs. Authenticity
For years, I made high-value content for global brands. It worked, until it didn't. What works now are lo-fi videos shot on phones with real people. Story still matters, but polish barely does.
Why did polish ever work? It's a cost signal — like celebrity endorsements or Super Bowl ads. Cost signals work because they're hard to fake. They show commitment. For most of marketing history, only the biggest brands could afford that level of production, so polish meant credibility.
But now AI can produce polished stuff at scale. Polish doesn't prove anything anymore. So where does the cost signal go?
Authenticity is the signal that drives trust in the AI age.
Most brands want to be authentic but most can't pull it off, because real authenticity is expensive and risky, more so than spending your way to credibility. That's exactly what makes it a cost signal.
The cost is conviction: doing what you believe even when it hurts. Like might mean losing customers, leaving money on the table, or making decisions that don't make sense on a spreadsheet.
The risk is vulnerability: showing imperfection, being human in ways that feel exposed. So people stop looking up at it and start seeing themselves in it.
But you can't just release sloppy work and call it authentic. Authenticity isn't a format, and that kind of thing will get you fired. the goal is to be rigorous about what you stand for, over about how everything looks.
Brand strength is what makes authenticity possible. It tells you which convictions you can actually hold and which vulnerabilities you can safely show.
Strong convictions have always been the root of differentiation — we just thought of them as an asset, not something customers demand from us. Think of a restaurant built on hospitality that turns away reservations to keep service personal. You know it's real because it costs them something.
Same with vulnerability. Every brand has weaknesses people already know about. We don't mind when an outdoor brand shows gear that failed in the field and what they learned from it. We don't mind when a startup ships a half-built feature and asks users to help finish it. It fits who they are.
Authenticity isn't one thing. The path looks different depending on what kind of brand you are.
Control vs. Co-creation
AI makes total brand control possible. Personalize everything, enforce consistency, run more with fewer people. Centralizing makes sense. But there's a catch.
AI-powered control is just broadcast on steroid. And broadcast fights two forces you can't beat: people want real connection, and they trust peers way more than brands.
So AI-enforced centralization solves the wrong problem. More efficient, sure. But less trusted.
People listen to people more than brands by at least three to one. That's why founder-led branding and influencer marketing work. Peer connection is durable while broadcast will only get weaker as AI floods every channel. You can automate consistency at scale, but it'll matter less and less.
So instead of using AI to build a temple, use it to grow a garden.
Give your audience tools to make the brand their own and let them put it together in their own way. The brand still feels like itself because the pieces are good, but the result feels like them. AI can nudge people in the right direction without locking things down. It keep the value and tone on track while letting their personality come through.
AI can also read those conversations at scale and catch things no survey or focus group ever would. Reddit threads surfacing use cases you never designed for. Influencers stress-testing new messages before you spend a dollar scaling them.
Your biggest fans are probably already talking about you on Discord, a YouTube comment section, or subreddit. AI helps you actually listen to all of that. Like spotting use cases you never designed for, messages that land before you spend a dollar testing them or problems before they blow up.
It goes beyond customers talking to each other. When founders, employees, and ambassadors show up and talk directly with customers, your owned channel becomes where those relationships actually live. Every conversation runs both ways, and you get to structure your channel around those conversations, so the people building the brand and the people using it are always in the same room.
Conclusion
AI will keep getting faster, cheaper, and more capable. It frees you to focus on what builds lasting brands.
But it also makes the job harder. Because now you’re managing paradoxes. You need seamlessness _and_ friction. Perfection _and_ authenticity. Control _and_ co-creation. Getting any one of these wrong costs you — too far in either direction, and you're either invisible or inefficient.
The good news is you don’t have to pick a side.
- Add friction that makes people feel something worth remembering.
- Lead with conviction and vulnerability, the only cost signals AI can’t fake.
- Grow gardens where your people build the brand with you.
Use AI everywhere it makes you faster while investing in the things that make you matter. Balancing scale with humanity is the great tug-of-war of our time. How you set the dial is a leadership choice you can start making today.
