What role should AI play in our brand direction?

Use AI to organise information about your brand's current position and explore where it could go next. AI-assisted analysis can bring together industry trends, audience segments and current brand performance, helping your team identify patterns, anomalies and opportunities worth investigating.

Give the analysis a forward-looking role as well: use what-if scenarios and predictive models to explore possible directions and their likelihood. The purpose is to develop a broader, clearer view of the options available, rather than move straight from a large amount of data to a single preferred answer. Bring the resulting opportunities into your team's discussion about which possibilities deserve attention and further investigation.

Keep strategic judgment with people: your team chooses which opportunities to pursue and which risks are worth taking. AI can organise messy information, identify audiences and highlight brand weaknesses, inconsistencies or gaps. AI cannot replace a clear point of view or take responsibility for the brand's direction.

Keep positioning, value proposition, target audience and brand behaviour at the centre of the decision. Those foundations shape what follows, particularly when AI will become part of the customer-facing brand experience. Use AI to help clarify opportunities, while retaining responsibility for deciding how the brand should act and what will move its audience.

Do not mistake apparently strong AI-assisted ideas for a varied set of strategic alternatives. A 2025 study reported by the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, found that ChatGPT-assisted brainstorming produced significantly lower idea diversity in 37 of 45 statistical comparisons across 5 experiments involving brainstorming tasks.