The Most Overlooked Stage of Your Brand Is the One That Decides if You’re Remembered

We talk a lot about brand awareness. About getting on the radar, getting into the conversation, getting on the shortlist.

We talk about conversion. About landing the deal, signing the contract, making it official.

…all while we’re really hoping to be talking about retention and advocacy.

But there’s a moment between decision and advocacy that gets glossed over, if not ignored entirely.

A moment that determines whether you deliver on the brand promises you spent months and millions building.

Onboarding.

Onboarding isn’t a support process.

It’s not a cost center.

It’s not a glorified checklist.

It’s your brand’s first real chance to prove it meant everything it said.

Most Onboarding Is Built Like a Manual, Not a Memory

Most companies treat onboarding like they’re writing a technical manual:

• Step 1: Confirm login

• Step 2: Watch training

• Step 3: Meet your CS rep

• Step 4: “Let us know if you need anything.”

It’s linear. Transactional. Soulless.

Which is strange, because this is the moment your customer is most open to you, the moment they’ve been waiting for.

They’re curious. Hopeful. Excited. Nervous.

They want to feel something.

Instead, they get a drip campaign and a support doc.

The Brand Doesn’t End at the Sale. It Begins.

Your brand is not your ads.

It’s not your pitch deck.

It’s not your font, your colors, or your elevator speech.

Your brand is the experience your customer has when they choose you.

Therefore:

• If your onboarding is forgettable, your brand becomes forgettable.

• If your onboarding is chaotic, your brand becomes untrustworthy.

And if your onboarding is cold and mechanical, your brand becomes… just another vendor.

What If You Treated Onboarding Like the Opening Scene of a Film?

What if onboarding wasn’t a step-by-step to-do list… but the opening scene of their transformation, where their real story begins?

What if you:

• Scripted it like your brand voice depended on it (because it does)?

• Resourced it like it was your greatest opportunity to differentiate (because it is)?

• Optimized it like your future advocacy, referrals, and upsells depended on it (because they do)?

Because here’s the thing:

You don’t win customers at the close. You win them in the first 90 days.

In the Next 18-36 Months, Onboarding Will Be a Key Differentiator

It’s already happening.

As product parity increases, marketing noise grows, and people seek out connections and community, experience is becoming the new moat.

Companies that understand onboarding as brand infrastructure will:

• Reduce churn without slashing price

• Create loyalty without gimmicks

• Activate advocacy without having to “ask for it”

They’ll win because of how it feels to become a customer. Not in spite of it.

So, Ask Yourself:

• Does our onboarding feel like us?

• Are we making new customers feel smarter, more confident, and genuinely excited?

• Or, are we just moving them through a system?

Because, in the story of your brand, onboarding isn’t a transition.

It’s the transformation.

A Quick Exercise

Want to evaluate your onboarding through a brand lens? Here’s a quick exercise.

Gather your leadership, CX, and marketing teams and ask:

1. What does our customer feel in their first 7 days with us?

2. What do they say to their team after their first onboarding session?

3. Where does the onboarding experience currently break the narrative we sold them?

Then go fix it.

Not because onboarding is broken, but because your brand story deserves to be complete.

What The First Twelve Narrative Assessments Taught Me About B2B Storytelling

From pre-funding teams to public companies, the patterns are the same.

After completing the first twelve narrative assessments, here are the five truths I keep seeing … and how to use them to build a narrative that actually moves revenue.

1) Your Origin Story Is Your Competitive Moat

The strongest differentiation isn’t a feature list. It’s the specific struggle that forced you to invent a better way. Competitors can clone products quickly; they can’t clone why you had to build yours.

What we find: teams bury the “oh-no” moments (near-failures, hard pivots, breakthrough realizations).

Do this: document three moments you’d tell a friend over coffee — the risk, the turn, the lesson — and make them the spine of your About page, sales deck, and founder videos.

2) Stop Being the Hero of Your Own Story

Most B2B content casts the company as Luke Skywalker. Your buyers don’t need Luke; they need Yoda.

What we find: pages filled with “we, we, we,” while customers are offstage.

Do this: rewrite one core asset using a guide frame:

• Hero: your customer

• Villain: the status quo risk they can’t ignore

• Gift: your method, not just your product

• Path: the smallest next step to progress

3) Raw Material Beats Polished Fiction

AI can accelerate; it can’t substitute for source material.

What we find: teams skip interviews and jump to manufactured copy that sounds like everyone else.

Do this: run 3–5 customer interviews before writing a word. Ask, “What changed after we started working together?” and “What almost made this fail?” Transcribe, highlight verbs, build your message map from the phrases customers actually use.

4) Measure More Than Vanity

Likes aren’t a strategy. Tie story to revenue through four levels:

• Awareness (remembered): aided/unaided recall, branded search, direct traffic lift

• Engagement (held attention): time on page, scroll depth, reply rate on outreach

• Conversion (moved revenue): demo requests per asset, pipeline sourced, win rate lift for deals exposed to narrative assets

• Advocacy (others tell it): testimonial volume, case-study reuse in sales, referrals

Do this: pick one metric per level, baseline it this month, and review it with sales every two weeks.

5) Small Teams Can Build Systems That Scale

You don’t need an army; you need an operating system.

What we find: “random acts of content” produced by 3–5 overstretched people.

Do this: install a light narrative OS:

• Pillars: 3 themes you’ll own for 12 months

• Story Arcs: repeatable outlines (Problem → Stakes → Shift → Proof → Path)

• Characters: founder, customer, practitioner—each with distinct POV

• Cadence: a simple waterfall (anchor post → sales enablement → social threads → email) that ships weekly without breaking the team

Start This Week (90 minutes)

1. Origin sprint (30 min): founders list the three “oh-no to aha” moments that founded the company.

2. Interview sprint (30 min): schedule 3 customer calls; lock in the questions; set a transcript template.

3. Measurement sprint (30 min): choose one metric per level; add to a shared dashboard with sales.

The Bottom Line

Most companies try to win with volume. More posts, more pages, more noise. The teams who grow faster install a narrative operating system: clear origin, customer-as-hero framing, real raw material, revenue-linked metrics, and a small-team cadence that compounds. It’s not about publishing more. It’s about knowing exactly what story you’re telling, why it matters to this audience, and how every asset advances that story toward measurable outcomes.

If you want a pragmatic, 12-month roadmap built for a 3–5 person team, Sightline’s Narrative Assessment maps your origin, reframes your story around your customer, and installs the operating system to scale it.

When You’re Ready: To replace “random acts of content” with a narrative that sells, let’s talk!

Conversation Pieces vs. Conversations That Matter

Trek Bicycle’s new CheckOUT is a conversation piece. It’s been a hundred+ post topic on multiple threads with cycling friends, so it’s accomplishing one goal as it’s clearly engineered to turn heads and be talked about.

It does make me wonder, though. Is this the kind of conversation the cycling industry needs right now?

Everyone keeps hearing the same refrain: the industry is struggling. Sales are soft, inventories are swollen, and even the largest brands are adjusting expectations. At the same time, many new bike announcements continue to push further up-market with hyper-niche, $8,000+ (Trek) and $20,000+ (Specialized) machines that few riders will ever buy.

This raises the bigger question: who are these products really for? And, what story do they tell about the future of cycling?

The Juxtaposition

The same day Trek’s new model was launched, that evening, I was at a community screening of Together We Ride: Minority Mountain Bikers In The Heartland. It’s a short film about cycling, the connections it creates, and the exclusivity that is inherent in the sport.

What struck me most wasn’t just the film itself, but the conversation in the room before and after the screening: People want to ride. They want to connect. But, too often, they can’t. Price and availability are real barriers.

These moments were a stark juxtaposition. On one side of the industry: a high-profile launch celebrating a bike most people will never even consider owning. On the other: a community conversation showing how much demand there really is if only cycling were more accessible.

I walked back to my car asking myself, “Why does the industry continue pouring its resources into the wrong side of the story?”

A Conversation We’re Avoiding?

• What if the real opportunity isn’t in making the elite, performance tier even more elite and capable, but in expanding the base of riders who can even imagine owning a decent bike in the first place?

• What if the gap isn’t a lack of cutting-edge performance, but a lack of accessible, reliable, and inspiring entry points into cycling?

• What if the industry’s strongest lever for growth isn’t technology or exclusivity, but narrative—reframing cycling as something attainable, joyful, and essential to everyday life?

Looking at the Market Differently

When we compare the U.S. market with global patterns, another question surfaces: Why do we keep treating high-end bikes as the centerpiece of the story, when the largest and most valuable markets globally are built on affordability, accessibility, and sheer volume of participation?

In much of the world, cycling doesn’t even consider the “n+1” indulgence. It’s simply a daily choice for mobility, health, or community. Why aren’t we paying closer attention to this?

Who Could Lead the Way?

Some brands are already hinting at what this could look like, leaning into style, affordability, and connection in ways that resonate with riders just starting out. But is that enough?

Why can’t a mainstream brand take the leap and commit to a wider audience? Not just through price point, but through community-building and narratives that make cycling welcoming to everyone? (Not feeling welcoming, but actually welcoming)

And if not, what does that mean for the industry’s long-term health, beyond endless cycles of (some degree of) boom and then bust?

A Narrative Crossroads

The truth is, there are no easy answers here. High-end bikes will always have a place. Innovation at the performance level does influence and impact overall product development, and it does drive culture in important ways.

However, maybe it’s worth asking: are we leaning too hard on those dynamics, while missing the opportunity to grow cycling into something much larger, more inclusive, and more sustainable?

What would happen if brands shifted even a portion of their energy from building conversation pieces to sparking conversations that matter … those about access, about community, about the millions of people who could become lifelong riders if only the industry met them where they are?

That’s not just a product launch. That’s a market-shaping narrative … and maybe that’s the conversation the industry really needs to be having right now.

Is Attention To Detail Your Competitive Edge?

We are moving so fast we aren’t noticing the cracks forming under their feet.

Projects are launching half-baked. Content is flooding inboxes. On the surface, this all looks like momentum. Underneath, however, the cost of missed details starts compounding, having very real impacts via errors, rework, and reputational hits. What looks like “speed” today becomes tomorrow’s mess.

The problem isn’t that we’re not doing enough. It’s that we’re doing too much, too fast, with too little care.

The Psychology of “More, Faster”

Our brains aren’t wired for this volume.

• Cognitive load theory shows humans can only juggle a limited amount of new information before performance collapses (Sweller, 1988).

• Stanford research on multitasking found heavy multitaskers are actually worse at switching tasks and filtering distractions than people who focus (Stanford, 2009).

• University of California research on attention span shows the average person now pays attention to a single screen for only about 47 seconds, compared to ~2.5 minutes in earlier eras (University of California, 2024).

Pile on AI and automation, and the problem only accelerates. We start trusting machine outputs without scrutiny, diving further into a bias called automation bias (Parasuraman & Riley, 1997). That’s how small errors slip through and snowball into expensive failures and it dates all the way back before the turn of the century … what’s old is, sadly, new, again.

The New Scarcity: Quality

The irony of the AI era is this: as output explodes, quality collapses.

Which means the rarest thing in the market is no longer speed. It’s precision. It’s trust.

Consumers and businesses are already reflecting this shift:

• Edelman’s Trust Barometer reports people reward brands they believe are consistent and reliable over those that just move fast (Edelman Trust Barometer 2024).

• McKinsey’s 2024 survey found that while 75% of companies adopted AI since 2020, only 23% reported actual quality improvements, most cite inconsistency and rework (McKinsey, 2024)

• And while younger generations (Gen Z, Millennials) value flexibility and digital-first experiences, they are fierce judges of quality. A brand that feels careless or sloppy loses them instantly (Deloitte Global Gen Z & Millennial Survey 2024).

In other words: the market is drowning in “good enough.” What people will pay for, what they will return for, is what’s done exceptionally well.

Doing Less, Better

This isn’t a call to abandon progress. It’s a call to cut ruthlessly. Do fewer things, but with deeper attention.

Because in a world where AI can generate 10,000 words in a blink, the human edge won’t be speed—it will be the judgment to know what matters, and the craft to deliver it without compromise.

The companies, teams, and individuals who thrive won’t be the ones producing more. They’ll be the ones whose work people actually trust, remember, and return to.

So here’s the challenge: What could you strip away this week, so the work you do actually lasts?

My First Step

For me, it’s meetings. Specifically, meetings without a clear agenda and defined outcomes. They’re speed disguised as progress. By stripping them away, I’m freeing time and focus to do fewer things, but with the depth and quality that actually move the needle.

Why Your B2B Stories Need Rounded Edges

You know how rounded buttons just feel friendlier than sharp-cornered ones? How certain websites feel instantly trustworthy while others make you want to click away?

(Dive much deeper on rounded v. sharp design here: Journal of Consumer Research)

The same principle applies to B2B brand narratives. Stories have sharp edges are more likely to make buyers pull back. Stories that have rounded edges are more likely to make them lean in.

…and most of us are telling stories with way too many sharp edges.

Stories Have Edges Too

Think about the last sales deck you saw. Was it packed with "cutting-edge solutions" and "best-in-class platforms" and enough acronyms to fill a dictionary? Every one of those phrases is a sharp edge. They poke. They prod. They create distance.

It’s quite ironic. B2B loves to talk about "cutting-edge" when people instinctively prefer rounded edges.

Now, think about the time someone told you a story about Sarah who used to spend her Sundays catching up on work but doesn't anymore. Something different happened, right? You relaxed. You pictured Sarah, maybe you saw a bit of yourself in her story. No poking. No prodding. Just curiosity about what changed for Sarah.

That's the difference between sharp and rounded narratives. One makes your brain work. The other makes your brain care.

Sharp vs. Rounded: A Tale of Two Pitches

Here's what sharp looks like: "Our AI-powered solution delivers operational excellence through advanced automation capabilities."

Did you feel that? That's your brain working overtime to decode what this actually means for you. It's all edges and they are abstract, aggressive, and alienating.

Now here's rounded: "Remember when your team had to manually process every invoice? That's gone now."

You had a different feeling, right? It's a question, not an assault. It’s an invitation to see yourself in the story.

That’s the power of smooth edges. They draw you in rather than sharp ones, that push you away.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

You're not selling to spreadsheets. You're selling to humans who happen to use spreadsheets. And humans, whether they're CFOs or interns, are drawn to what feels safe, approachable, and familiar.

When you round your narrative edges, something measurable happens.

• People actually finish reading

• They move through your sales process faster

• They share your story with colleagues because stories travel while specifications are archived in your inbox

The companies winning complex B2B sales aren't the ones with the sharpest edges. They're the ones who figured out that "cutting-edge" is exactly the wrong metaphor when you want someone to come closer.

The Rounded Revolution

So how do you know if your narratives have too many sharp edges?

Here's a simple test: Would your customer say it that way? If not, you've found a sharp edge.

"We're leveraging synergies" is sharp. "We're working better together" is rounded.

"Best-in-class solution" is sharp. "The thing that actually works" is rounded.

"Digital transformation initiative" is sharp. "Finally fixing that annoying manual process" is rounded.

The beautiful thing about rounded narratives is they're actually easier to create.

You don't need a thesaurus or an MBA. You need to listen to how your happiest customers describe what you did for them.

They never say "operational excellence." They say "I get home on time now."

The Question That Changes Everything

Every piece of content you create, every deck you design, every email you send has edges. The question isn't whether you're telling your story. The question is whether you're telling it in a way that invites people in or keeps them at arm's length.

The reality is sharp narratives feel like work. They require decoding, translating, and processing … and no one has time for more work.

They exhaust buyers before you even get to the value.

Rounded narratives feel like conversation. They flow naturally from problem to solution to transformation. They create connection instead of distance.

So, What?

Take a look at your latest sales narrative. Count the sharp edges. Get a notepad and put a tally down for each piece of jargon, each abstractions, each aggressive claims. Then ask yourself: Would Sarah tell it this way?

In the end, nobody wants to grab onto something with sharp edges. Not buttons, not brands, and definitely not B2B solutions.

Companies that understand this aren't trying to be cutting-edge anymore.

They're too busy closing deals with their well defined rounded stories.

The Jevons Paradox In Marketing

The Jevons Paradox says: when efficiency improves, consumption rises.

It’s happening in marketing right now.

AI makes content cheaper, faster, easier.

However, instead of clarity, we get noise.

Efficiency doesn’t create signal. It amplifies chaos.

That’s why I’ve been working on something I’m calling The Narrative Advantage:

• Deep, authentic, data-driven storytelling.

• A clear, defensible narrative that turns efficiency into impact.

Without The Narrative Advantage: Efficiency just scales noise.

With The Narrative Advantage: Efficiency scales your story.

I’m getting ready to release the first version.

Want an advance copy? DM me over on LinkedIn, or fill out our Contact Us Form and I’ll share it with you.

Brand in the AI Era: 5 Practices Every Executive Must Master to Stay in Control

You’re not just marketing anymore. You’re programming belief into, and building trust within, an AI-driven world.

Generative AI has changed the mechanics of how your brand is perceived, repeated, and reshaped in the market.

The more AI is involved, the more your message depends on the systems, models, and prompts you feed it.

If you’re in the C-suite, you can’t delegate this entirely to marketing. The health of your brand is now a leadership issue. It’s about control, trust, and long-term market relevance. It’s about infrastructure strategy as much as messaging.

From our client work, we’ve identified five core practices that determine whether a brand thrives or drifts in the AI era.

Each one is actionable for your organization, starting right now.

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1. Build Your Narrative Infrastructure

Your story can’t just be in your team’s heads or your brand guidelines. It must live inside the systems that are now informing and/or generating your content and communications.

What it Means: Your tone, context, value propositions, and positioning need to be embedded in AI tools, CMS workflows, and marketing automation platforms so that whether it’s a human, a chatbot, or a summarization tool, your story doesn’t drift.

Action Steps:

• Audit every system that touches your content: CRM, email, chat, support scripts, sales enablement. Identify where narrative elements live (and where they don’t).

• Build an AI-ready brand guide that includes model-friendly instructions and example prompts.

• Train your internal teams on using these instructions across tools and how to address errors / issues when they (inevitably) arise.

Key Question: If I prompted every AI tool we use, would I get the same brand story every time?

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2. Establish a Content Chain of Custody

If you can’t answer who created a message, what data trained it, or how it was validated, you’re gambling with your credibility. Your hard earned trust is at risk.

What it Means: Chain of custody isn’t just for compliance. It’s central to trust. Audit logs and metadata about content creation, approval, and publishing must become standard practice.

Action Steps:

• Require all AI-generated content to include a creation log (who/what produced it and when).

• Track prompts, training data sources, and revisions for every significant asset.

• Create a validation step before publishing to ensure accuracy and brand alignment.

Key Question: If a customer challenged the authenticity of our latest communication, could we prove its origin?

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3. Develop Model-Aware Messaging

One voice everywhere? Dead. AI tools don’t behave identically. Your brand will sound different in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or a proprietary LLM unless you deliberately adapt.

What it Means: Your story must be consistent at the strategic level but tailored to the quirks, strengths, and constraints of each model your teams use.

Action Steps:

• Test your core messages in multiple models. Document differences in tone, completeness, and accuracy.

• Create model-specific “tuning” instructions to preserve brand voice.

• Review and refine regularly as models update.

Key Question: Do we know how our brand’s language changes between the AI tools we already rely on?

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4. Treat Strategic Prompting as a Brand Skill

Your best copywriters are now as proficient with prompts as they are with creating content. If they can’t lead the model, the model will lead your message … and you’re potentially cooked!

What it Means: Prompting isn’t just a creative task. It’s a brand defense mechanism. The right prompts, the right training data / content, help AI generate content that aligns with your voice and your story without needing heavy revision.

Action Steps:

• Train marketing, sales, and comms teams on brand-specific prompt frameworks.

• Maintain a library of approved prompts for high-value content types.

• Assign prompt QA responsibility to a senior team member.

Key Question: Who in our company ensures AI tools follow, not rewrite, our brand’s intent?

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5. Embed Trust-First Frameworks in Every Message

Clarity. Transparency. Consistency. These are today’s (and tomorrow’s) brand survival strategies.

What it Means: Trust-first frameworks build resilience into your communications so they hold up under scrutiny, fact-checking, and resharing.

Action Steps:

• Establish non-negotiable brand principles for accuracy, disclosure, and transparency.

• Review messaging against these principles before approval.

• Make trust a KPI in brand health reporting.

Key Question: Is trust something we hope to earn, or something we’ve systematically designed into every communication, every engagement?

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The Leadership Imperative

These five practices aren’t just marketing tactics. They’re operational disciplines for an AI-driven business landscape.

The risk isn’t that AI will get your messaging slightly wrong. It’s that without these systems in place, your brand becomes a series of unverified, inconsistent messages that compound very quickly over time.

If you want to own your narrative in the AI era, start here:

• Pick one practice.

• Assign ownership.

• Build a baseline this quarter.

Remember: Those who do it well won’t just cut through the noise. They’ll own the conversation.

If you’re ready to tackle this issue, we’re ready to help.

AI Is Marketing Infrastructure. Are Your Brand Systems Ready?

Last week, I shared AI Is Scaling. Trust Isn't. The second in my three-part series.

TL;DR Recap: Your voice doesn’t need to be the loudest. Just a clear one that people believe, and trust.

This week, in the final piece of the series stemming from my analysis of America's AI Action Plan, I highlight the five core practices I believe are critical for brand resilience in the AI era.

America is building the future of AI. Are you building the brand systems that can survive it?

The AI Action Plan calls for:

• Expanded energy grids and hyper-scale data centers

• Open deployment across government, defense, and private enterprise

• Global export of the American AI stack as a strategic asset

The goal is speed and scale. The risk is message collapse.

Here’s what brand leaders must understand:

• This isn’t just about power and chips. It’s about meaning.

• When AI becomes the default interface for how customers, employees, and partners interact with your company, your brand becomes a system function.

• If that system isn’t anchored in a coherent story, built with prompt-level safeguards, and governed across tools and teams—you’re not communicating. You’re broadcasting noise.

I believe brand resilience in the AI era depends on 5 core practices:

1. Narrative Infrastructure: Your story must scale across AI agents, not just people. That means brand rules, tone, context, and strategic positioning embedded in every system.

2. Content Chain of Custody: Who created this message? What trained it? How was it validated? You need answers. You also need audit logs.

3. Model-Aware Messaging: Your brand language must adapt to the constraints and quirks of each model you use. It’s not “one voice everywhere” anymore. It’s “one story, tuned to the platform.”

4. Strategic Prompting: Your best copywriters are now prompt engineers. Equip them to lead the message—not just clean it up after the fact.

5. Trust-First Frameworks / Playbooks: Clarity. Transparency. Consistency. These aren’t copywriting tactics. They are officially survival strategies.

You’re not just marketing anymore. You’re programming belief into an AI-shaped world.

And those who do it well?

They won’t just cut through the noise. They’ll own the conversation.

AI Is Scaling. Trust Isn’t. This is a Communications Crisis

What’s the point of brand awareness if no one believes what you say?

Last week, I shared The Invisible Risk in AI Policy: What Happens to the Brand?

TL;DR Recap: Whether we like it or not, AI is rewriting the rules of communication. So, unless we redesign the systems behind our brand voice, our story will drift. First quietly. Then suddenly

This week, I’m going deeper because the real problem isn't the speed just speed. It's scale without trust.

America’s AI Action Plan embraces a frictionless vision: de-regulate, open-source, deploy rapidly, and dominate globally.

It even mandates every federal agency ensure “to the maximum extent practicable” that employees use frontier models.

There’s a lot here. 28 pages to be exact. However, when I read it, I see a lot more missing than present including a plan to ensure these tools don’t distort truth, flatten nuance, or accelerate bias and confusion at scale.

These omissions affect every company, every brand.

Here’s what America's AI Action Plan means for company leadership, today:

Your narrative is no longer yours by default.

• As AI reshapes internal workflows, external campaigns, and public discourse, brands will increasingly sound the same.

• Speed will cannibalize your brand’s soul if you don’t deliberately preserve your voice and your POV.

The cost of inconsistency just exploded.

• Open-weight systems + no shared standards = messaging that shifts subtly across every platform and channel.

• Every hallucination, every off-brand phrase, every insensitive output now bears your logo.

• Moving fast and breaking things will only be an acceptable excuse for the most minor communications and positioning transgressions or mistakes.

To cut through the noise, and not be consumed by AI-driven brand voice, companies must:

1. Architect brand-safe AI pipelines: Treat your AI stack like your CRM or CMS. Every system that generates messaging must be governed, trained, and monitored against clear standards.

2. Train for narrative resilience: Don’t just chase trends. Develop a rock-solid core story and set of values. Train your AI pipeline on it and your teams to defend it, especially when generative tools push for sameness.

3. Position trust as strategy, not sentiment: Trust is not a soft metric. It determines message reach, brand recall, and revenue confidence in every market.

Remember, your voice doesn’t need to be the loudest. Just a clear one that people believe.

The Invisible Risk in AI Policy: What Happens to the Brand?

What happens when the systems that shape language, and generate content, no longer reflect the values of the brand using them?

America’s AI Action Plan reads like a blueprint for dominance: deregulation, infrastructure, and global distribution. It outlines a future where “whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global standards.”

What it doesn’t outline is this:

How do brands maintain trust when the tools they use to communicate are reshaping the meaning of communication itself?

For brand and communications leaders, this is not theoretical. It’s operational. Right now.

AI will soon touch, if not produce, every message, story, and campaign. Most importantly, if the foundational models your company relies on don’t reflect your brand’s values, you’ll lose message fidelity, erode audience trust, and create a growing disconnect between what you say and what customers experience.

For brand, marketing, and comms teams, this means your message is no longer just about what you say. It’s about how the tools you use say it.

That’s a new kind of brand risk.

So ask yourself:

• Who trains the systems you rely on to represent your brand voice?

• Do your AI-powered content workflows reinforce—or erode—your values?

• Are you ready to audit and govern messaging generated beyond human review?

Three things I believe every brand must prioritize right now:

1. Define brand values as AI constraints: Don’t just document your voice—codify what should and should not be generated in your name.

2. Audit every AI-touchpoint: Emails, product copy, chatbots, investor decks—your audience doesn’t care whether a human or a model wrote it. They expect consistency.

3. Establish prompt-to-publish oversight: Marketing operations must evolve. Governance isn’t optional. It’s infrastructure.

Clarity, not speed, is your real differentiator in the age of AI.