Perspectives
Executive Summary: For decades, the fundamentals of brand growth have been remarkably stable. Strong brands are distinctive. They create emotional connection, demonstrate superiority, and they influence behavior. AI doesn’t change those fundamentals, but it changes how they are achieved. Farid Jeeawody explores what that shift means in practice, and what brands need to do differently to protect relationships, drive brand growth, and create value in an increasingly AI-driven world.
AI is changing more than how brands are found
Much of the discussion around AI has focused on search. Will brands appear in AI-generated answers? What happens when consumers stop clicking links? These are important questions, but they risk missing the bigger shift.
AI is increasingly influencing how brands become distinctive, create emotional connection, demonstrate superiority, and convert intention into action — changing how brands build relationships and drive growth. AI is becoming part of how brands and consumers interact. It isn’t replacing those relationships, but it is shaping them.
At Hall & Partners, we have long understood brand growth through four connected principles: Distinctiveness, Emotional Connection, Superiority, and Behavior. The opportunity now is understanding how each is being reshaped in a world where AI increasingly sits between brands and the people they serve.
AI raises the value of distinctiveness
As AI becomes more involved in how people discover and choose brands, clear brand distinctivity becomes increasingly important. AI needs signals to identify and differentiate brands. The clearer those signals are, the easier it is for AI to recognize, describe, and recommend a brand. The challenge is therefore not whether AI sees your brand. It is whether AI sees a clear and compelling reason to choose it.
Distinctiveness needs to be visible across the wider ecosystem of content, reviews, and experiences that AI encounters and interprets — not just in advertising.
Coca Cola: Making distinctive assets work harder
Coca-Cola put this principle into practice through its Create Real Magic platform. It gave creators access to iconic assets (the contour bottle, the script logo) to generate original artwork using AI. Selected creations appeared on digital billboards in Times Square and Piccadilly Circus. Rather than treating AI as a production tool, Coca-Cola used it to reinforce the cues that make the brand instantly recognizable.
What this means for brands
- Understand what AI currently associates your brand with
- Ensure distinctive assets are consistently expressed across the wider ecosystem, not just in advertising
- Assess visibility around customer needs and occasions, not simply category terms
Our work on brand tracking helps brands understand how those distinctive associations are currently showing up.
The risk of being understood but not felt
AI can tell people what a brand does, but it struggles to convey how a brand makes people feel. As AI increasingly summarises and recommends brands, there is a risk that emotional meaning becomes compressed into functional descriptions. Brands may become easier to understand, but harder to feel. That matters because emotional connection remains one of the strongest drivers of long-term brand growth.
The challenge is not whether AI understands your brand. It is whether people still feel the same way about it when AI tells the story.
IKEA: Using AI to create more human experiences
IKEA's AI assistant Billie was introduced to handle routine enquiries. Rather than using automation simply to reduce cost, IKEA retrained thousands of employees into more consultative customer-facing roles, including remote interior design advisors. The result was a deliberate shift of human expertise toward the moments where empathy and creativity create the greatest value. IKEA's remote sales centers reportedly generated more than €1.25 billion in revenue. AI wasn’t about replacing people. It was about freeing them up to create better brand experiences.
What this means for brands
- Explore how AI should express your brand's personality and values
- Define where AI adds value and where human interaction creates emotional connection
- Measure trust, confidence and satisfaction alongside efficiency
AI rewards brands that stand for something clear
When consumers ask AI to compare products, evaluate alternatives or recommend solutions, vague positioning becomes much harder to hide. AI tends to reward clarity. Brands with confused positioning or weak evidence become harder to distinguish.
How can brands demonstrate superiority when consumers increasingly rely on AI to compare and evaluate their options? The answer starts with clarity: a clear proposition, credible proof points, and consistent messaging make it easier for AI to understand what makes a brand different and better.
IBM: Turning positioning into proof
When AI became the biggest topic in technology, many brands rushed to talk about innovation. IBM took a different approach. Its "Trust What You Create" campaign used generative AI to bring to life the risks of poorly governed AI systems, reinforcing IBM's long-standing position around trusted enterprise technology. Rather than simply claiming expertise in AI, the campaign demonstrated why trust, governance and oversight matter.
What makes the example interesting is that IBM did not change its positioning for the AI era. It used AI to make its positioning more visible and easier to understand .
What this means for brands
- Ensure your positioning can be explained clearly and simply
- Support claims with evidence AI can access and validate
- Use AI to help customers experience your advantages, not simply hear about them
In an AI-shaped world, superiority cannot simply be claimed. It has to be demonstrated.
From recommendation to action
Most of the AI conversation so far has been about discovery: being found, being compared, being recommended. But AI is moving beyond helping people decide, into helping to make decisions for them: filtering options, applying rules, completing the purchase.
That shifts where brands need to show up. The next phase of AI is not just about answers; it is about actions.
Amazon: Closing the gap between decision and action
Amazon reported that more than 250 million customers used Rufus, its AI shopping assistant which answers product questions and suggests options as people browse, in 2025 and customers who used it during a shopping journey were 60 percent more likely to complete a purchase. Amazon has since incorporated Rufus capabilities into Alexa for Shopping, enabling customers to compare products, receive recommendations and take actions such as setting purchasing rules around price thresholds.
What makes this important is not the technology itself, but what it tells us about the future of customer journeys. AI is no longer confined to helping people discover information. It is increasingly helping them decide what to do next.
What this means for brands
- Remove friction throughout the journey
- Ensure product information is complete and easy for AI to interpret
- Consider how AI agents may evaluate and compare your offer
Hall & Partners' BeSci x AI capability is designed for exactly this shift, combining behavioral science with AI to understand not just what consumers do, but the motivations and frictions shaping what they do next.
The next competitive advantage will not be appearing in the AI answer. It will be making the next action easier, more confident and more valuable.
Key takeaways
- AI is reshaping how consumers discover, understand, evaluate, and experience brands — not just how they find them
- Distinctive assets need to be consistent across the full ecosystem AI encounters, not just advertising
- Emotional connection remains one of the hardest qualities for AI to convey and therefore one of the most important for brands to protect
- Clear positioning and credible proof points are rewarded by AI; vague positioning becomes more exposed
- The next competitive advantage will not be appearing in the AI answer but making the next action easier, more confident and more valuable
Managing brand relationships in an AI world
AI does not change what brands need to achieve. Brands still need to stand out, create emotional connection, demonstrate superiority and ultimately influence behavior. What AI changes is the role it plays in achieving those outcomes.
AI is becoming part of the brand relationship itself. It is influencing how people discover brands, how they understand them, how they evaluate them and, increasingly, how they experience them.
The brands that thrive in the AI era will not be those that change what they stand for. They will be the ones that ensure the qualities that made them successful remain visible, meaningful and distinctive even when AI becomes part of how their story is told.
The challenge for brands is therefore not simply keeping pace with a new technology. It is understanding how AI is shaping the relationships they have spent years building and ensuring it reinforces, rather than dilutes, what makes those relationships valuable in the first place.
At Hall & Partners, we help brands understand how AI is reshaping the relationships they have spent years building — and how to ensure it reinforces, rather than dilutes, what makes those relationships valuable. Get in touch to learn more.
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Key Questions
AI is becoming part of how consumers discover, understand, evaluate, and experience brands. While AI does not replace the fundamentals of brand growth, it is changing how brands build distinctiveness, create emotional connection, demonstrate superiority, and influence behavior.
AI relies on signals across content, reviews, experiences, and other sources to identify and describe brands. Brands with clear and distinctive assets, associations, and positioning are therefore better placed to be recognized, differentiated, and recommended by AI.
AI can accurately communicate functional information about a brand, but emotional meaning can be harder to convey. Brands therefore need to consider how AI expresses their personality and values, while identifying where human judgment, empathy, and creativity create greater value.
Brands need to make their advantages clear, credible, and easy to validate. Clear positioning, consistent messaging, and accessible proof points can help AI understand and communicate why a brand is different and better. Brands can also use AI to help customers experience those advantages rather than simply hear claims about them.
AI is increasingly helping consumers move from exploration to decision, comparison to purchase, and intention to behavior. For brands, this means reducing friction across the customer journey, making product information easy for AI to interpret, and considering how AI systems may evaluate and compare their offers.
