How brands can stay human in an AI world

The great ChatGPT disruption of 2022 had marketers feeling both awe and unease. While AI had long supported back-end martech operations, a new generation of tools brought AI to the front lines—interacting with customers directly, shaping content, influencing creative decisions and raising fresh questions about craft, brand safety, transparency and authenticity. Brands suddenly had to consider how much creative control and customer interaction they were comfortable handing over to algorithms. That tension still lingers.

The answer is the same as it’s always been: AI should enable brands—not the other way around. Use AI to extend promise into new expressions, but don’t let the tech define voice, values or vision.

Building timelessness through relevance

AI is an enabler, but it’s a powerful one. For example, AI can help businesses manage more complicated, nuanced challenges, such as building timeless brands amid rapid disruption, which requires brands to stay rooted and fluid at once. Timeless brands must evolve with culture without being consumed by it. When applied wisely, AI can help strike that balance by helping you adapt intelligently.

Consider Hellmann’s and Knorr, Unilever brands that used AI to guide new product development in ways that honor its longstanding values of sustainability, health, and quality. AI enables Unilever to simulate thousands of product formulations, incorporate emerging dietary preferences, and bring products to market faster. What makes this powerful is that the technology serves the brand. Consumers aren’t connecting with the AI behind Knorr’s Zero Salt Stock Cubes or Hellman’s Plant-Based Mayo. They’re connecting with Unilever’s promise to help them eat healthier.

Service that delivers the brand promise

Consider Hellmann’s and Knorr, Unilever brands that used AI to guide new product development in ways that honor its longstanding values of sustainability, health, and quality. AI enables Unilever to simulate thousands of product formulations, incorporate emerging dietary preferences, and bring products to market faster. What makes this powerful is that the technology serves the brand. Consumers aren’t connecting with the AI behind Knorr’s Zero Salt Stock Cubes or Hellman’s Plant-Based Mayo. They’re connecting with Unilever’s promise to help them eat healthier. Service that delivers the brand promise

Brands will eventually get it right. The luxury category provides a good litmus test for how well businesses can be timeless while incorporating conversational AI. For example, Mercedes-Benz has developed a generative AI-powered voice assistant designed to provide concierge-style in-car support. The system, based on ChatGPT, goes beyond basic voice commands by integrating with the car’s infotainment system to deliver contextually relevant, conversational responses.

Premium brands ranging from luxury watchmaker Audemars Piguet to the Ritz-Carlton have been embracing conversational AI for years, but luxury brands still face the challenge of managing the interplay between the efficiency of digital and the warmth of the human touch. Part of the solution is how AI is branded, an example being a digital concierge, which feels more on-brand for a luxury hotel guest than a chatbot. Brands that figure out the interplay can be timeless and yet adaptable.

As AI handles more service interactions, all brands, whether hotels or quick-service restaurants, have to ask: Does the experience sound like us? Feel like us? Represent our values in action? AI can help meet consumer expectations for convenience, but it must also embody the brand promise at every touchpoint.

Localization without losing the plot

Global brands face an added challenge—how to stay timeless while adapting to different regional markets. Here again, AI can support the brand if applied with intention.

Many brands are figuring out this delicate interplay of honoring the brand while adapting to increasingly diverse audiences. For example, in the entertainment industry, legacy brands such as Paramount and digital natives including Netflix and Spotify use AI all the time to localize content for different regions without losing the creative essence of their core brands.

Other companies are following suit. Landmark Group, a major omnichannel retailer in the Middle East, uses AI-powered localization tools to adapt content for 57 brands across 21 countries. AI helps the company ensure cultural relevance by tailoring messaging, imagery and product descriptions to local tastes. At the same time, the group retains its overarching promise of delivering high-quality retail experiences across all markets.

The thread tying them together is that AI is a tool for translation, not transformation. It adapts the expression of the brand, not the essence of it.

A timeless brand needs a helping hand

The point isn’t to resist AI but to remember AI’s role. AI can surface patterns you can’t see, personalize content at scale, simulate market responses, localize faster and speed up product development. But it doesn’t know who you are. It doesn’t understand your customers’ unspoken emotional drivers or your brand’s cultural relevance. That’s still your job.

Brands become timeless by building emotional connections. That requires traits AI can’t replicate: empathy, foresight, cultural intuition and storytelling. The role of AI is to enhance those human strengths, not to replace them.

Used well, AI can help marketers respond faster, design smarter and scale more effectively. It can help you sense subtle shifts in consumer sentiment, explore adjacent markets and tailor experiences at an individual level. But all of that must map back to a clear, consistent brand compass. That compass is human and must remain so.

A brand is not a prompt. It’s a promise. Promises are upheld through intuition, creativity and care.

Let AI help you adapt, but don’t let it rewrite who you are. Build brands that evolve with culture without being consumed by it. That’s how you stay relevant without losing your roots. That’s how you become timeless.

This article originally appeared in Ad Age.