How to grow your most valuable asset in the age of AI

fastcompany.com

A brand is still a company’s most valuable asset. It’s an intangible collection of signs, symbols, colors, behaviors, and voice, which never shows up cleanly on a balance sheet. You build it cumulatively, and when it finally comes together, it drives real business value. It’s why consumers pay more for a certain phone, sneaker, or pill. It’s why people choose you, again and again. Until recently, people built this asset. Founders, business leaders, marketing teams, and the people on the front line interacting with customers shaped what the brand stood for and how it showed up. AI is rapidly changing this relationship. Increasingly, people don’t meet your brand directly. They meet an AI’s version of it through an LLM’s summary, an agent’s comparison, a generated image, or an answer that shows up before your website loads. According to recent research from R/GA’s forthcoming Agentic Commerce report, 64% of consumers have used AI to research a product or service in the past three months. A brand used to live almost entirely in what a company said and made. Today, AI agents increasingly influence how brands are represented and how consumers experience them. THE SOUL IS MISSING The marketing industry’s first instinct has been to treat AI as a production opportunity. Large holding companies and creative infrastructure players have spent the last couple of years plugging brands into generative pipelines to churn out assets, driving gains in output and efficiency that, when you look at the bottom line alone, might look like success. But when you look at the outputs, there’s a problem. The experiences and content created are just okay. They are technically on-brand, but also completely forgettable. In a recent study, we found about 60% of consumers say a brand’s use of low-quality AI-generated content would negatively affect their opinion of that brand and likelihood to purchase from them, and this was most pronounced with Gen Z. We’re creating more, but not necessarily better brand assets. Experiences that might clear an automated compliance check give nobody a reason to pick you over your competitor. The marketing industry prioritized scale over substance and soul, and consumers can feel it. The natural response from organizations has been to add more guardrails through tighter prompts, stricter review, and better filters on the pipeline, but this doesn’t always translate to better outcomes. They’re trying to fine-tune existing systems instead of asking what else is needed. Creating agentic systems that can deliver quality outcomes and add value to your greatest asset gives people a reason to choose you first. DESIGN FOR DUAL AUDIENCES At R/GA, we’ve found better outcomes start with defining and designing brands for humans and agents. That means designing brands to be machine-readable and writable, with designers shaping the systems that create experiences as a creative expression. It goes beyond a brand’s typeface or color palette to define what context matters most and training agents to make decisions in keeping with the brand. We’ve been calling this approach Brand DNA or BRDNA. It’s a simple metaphor. Just as our DNA shapes who we are and how we behave, a brand’s distinct and salient traits become living code that guides people, machines, and experiences. This approach also centers on designers and strategists actively training agents and deploying them within an organization’s existing creative workflows and tech stack. The goal is to create agents that have enough context about what the brand values, what it prioritizes, and what it would never do, so that they can make a judgment call the way a good creative director would. This connects character and code, scales what is most valuable about the brand, and helps protect it. All of this serves to make sure the experience itself is worth choosing. We’ve been building and fine-tuning this approach with our partners. For example, for G42 we built a new type of AI-enabled adaptive interface that replaced a traditional website. When visitors land on their homepage, an AI agent greets users and orchestrates the experience in real time around their specific questions or needs, reshaping content and format for each. We applied this same approach in a very different way for FOX One to help them deepen engagement around the World Cup. For millions of viewers, fandom often ends the moment their national team crashes out of the tournament. We created an AI-powered experience to pair fans with new teams based on their interests and behaviors. The agent became an active part of the experience, creating personalized content streams and the agent even watched games alongside fans, delivering real-time context, cultural insight, and commentary that turns casual viewers into committed supporters. The agent made decisions and acted on behalf of the brand, all steered by the brand’s unique DNA. Both examples point to the same shift. Brands need to be machine-readable and writable, with agents crafted to make decisions that reflect the brand’s integrity and create experiences that feel additive to your brand’s assets. We believe this new approach is necessary to help brands get ahead. Not by AI-ifying your workflows for efficiency’s sake, but by ensuring your greatest asset is elevated by technology, not diminished by it. Melissa Jackson Parsey is the global chief strategy officer at R/GA.