Two weeks ago, I went to an event titled AI for Marketers in Mechelen (Belgium). As the name suggests, the sessions revolved around how AI has, and will continue to, change marketing. I sat there overwhelmed with the information and oddly excited about the possibilities. AI orchestration layers. Video creation. Better storytelling. The opportunities felt infinite.

The thing that stayed with me on the train home wasn’t the tooling. It was a quieter claim running underneath all of it: AI is about to change how brands get built. Not just company brands. Personal ones too. 

We see it all around us. Recycled content. Repetitive sentence usage. An absolute dearth of creativity. The sloppening, as one speaker at the event termed it, is upon us. Never have we seen this avalanche of content, and people have already grown weary of it. You know the tells by now: the forest of em-dashes, the "exciting news!!" posts, the "it's not X, it's Y" cadence you can smell from three scrolls away.

However, clickbait content without substance no longer stands out. When slop became free and infinite, "more content" stopped being an advantage. Brands that relied on ragebait, hot takes, contrarian content stopped becoming exciting. 

Companies who want to build a brand in the AI age now have to go back to the drawing board and think of new tropes and ideas.

Human input, accelerated by AI, is the key here. Now, you need to go beyond merely inputting your perspective into ChatGPT or Claude and asking it to make content. You need to dive deeper into your voice and what actually makes you different in the market you are trying to build a brand in.

So this is me telling you how to build yours in the AI age.

Sounds kinda obvious? The idea is simple even if the execution isn't. Brands are trying to establish a unique identity in the mind of the consumer. And AI, unfortunately, is built on existing information already in the market. It cannot really be inventive. It puts a twist on what is already known. Inventing is your job!

To build a brand you have to focus on your voice and your unique attributes and highlight those, LOUDLY. It means that on LinkedIn, or wherever you live, there has to be a distinct element people associate with only you.

How do you build your voice? I have mine saved as a Claude skill now. But I began manually writing almost every piece of content till I reached 10. So write 10 LinkedIn posts, or blog articles, or other pieces of content. See how they perform. Review and tweak till you reach 10 content pieces that you are pleased with. 

But don’t stop at building your voice! Experiment consistently, I've recently started an experiment on my own LinkedIn: I use the term aura farming for my freelance work, helping founders build personal brands. (Yes, I lifted a piece of gen-z slang and bent it to my purpose. Putting a twist on the familiar. The principle eating its own tail, which I find funnier than I should.) The visual side of the same experiment is the green I use across my posts, so a post reads as mine before a single word is.

Is it working? Only time will tell

The only other thing AI cannot copy is your audience. One speaker at the event even declared: Distribution is going to be the biggest moat in the AI age.

The audience you pull is the one asset no one can take from you. Strip away the algorithm, the format trend of the week, the tooling, and what remains is the people who chose to listen. Humans look for other humans. They want connection and community, not a content feed. So build that newsletter. Start that YouTube channel. Start that subreddit. A bird in hand here is worth two in the bush, and you will thank yourself in two years.

Here are some brands that have done this well: 

Once you have established your brand voice and you have a mechanism to build an audience, AI is a phenomenal orchestration layer. It can scale the ‘unmistakably-you’ work, draft against your voice, run the checks, handle the mechanical parts of distribution so you can spend your time talking to people in your niche and amplifying what you actually think.

Whether you are using Claude skills (which I do) or an agent, AI’s real power is executing clearly drafted instructions. 

While we are talking about using AI as an orchestration layer, one tool I have found particularly helpful is Wispr Flow, it helps me record all my ideas and prompts without me having to ever type it! [AD]

The detailed ones. The ones with examples and edge cases. Wispr Flow lets you speak them instead — clean, structured, ready to paste into any AI tool. Free on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.

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AI still needs humans to check the work and what AI cannot supply is taste. 

Taste, taste, taste, one speaker kept repeating, and I half-winced, because taste is the one thing I cannot install for a client. AI doesn't fully understand what's on brand and what isn't. It can give you indications. It does not get it the way a human does. At least not yet.

I know not whether all of this actually works. There are domains where pure AI slop still works fine, primarily information-heavy domains like SAP, but those are the exceptions not the rule. In a crowded marketplace, the only voice that stands out might be the one that doesn't sound like AI at all.

I still have some unanswered questions: Is taste a durable moat, or a temporary one? Is "be unmistakably you" a real strategy, or the comforting thing those of us who sell this stuff tell ourselves right up until the models get good enough to fake it too?

I don't have these answers. I'll report back when I do.