You can open with the sexiest of all smiles.
Make a promise without saying a word.
Wrap-up with a touch that sends shivers.
And it’ll all be for naught…
…UNLESS THE ROBOT LETS YOU IN!

For decades, the click was the coin of the digital realm.
A click told you someone noticed your ad,
liked your story,
or was interested enough to take a first step.
Clicks fueled business models,
sparked trillion-dollar platforms, and
delivered what marketers had long dreamt of:
measurability.

It told us what worked. Who was converting.
Even which customers were worth having.
Effortless for the user and rich in data for the marketer,
the click became the bar against which
modern marketing was optimized.

The click was signal. Currency. Power.

And like most things built for humans,
it worked in a very human way.
Move people, and they move too.
Touch them, and they respond.

It was a continuation of everything learned
in the golden age of advertising
but more reciprocal,
more precise, and more interactive.
A nearly perfect system for surfacing needs,
sharing meaning, and
connecting people to what they wanted.

But as quickly as it rose,
the click is beginning to vanish.
And in its place,
a new model of discovery is taking hold.
One where search is no longer limited to
people typing queries into a browser and instead
increasingly dominated
by AI agents who’ve scanned, sorted,
evaluated, and shortlisted
thousands of options
before a desire is any more than
a twinkle in someone’s eye.

In such a world,
success is less impacted
by human responses to stimuli (aka clicks)
and more about how machines filter the world:
through pattern recognition,
statistical likelihoods,
and historical context.
AIs are deciding what gets noticed
and more attention …
and what just quietly disappears.

The result is a different kind of marketplace.
One where brands can’t count on
generating a click from any passing human
in search of dopamine.
Instead, brands have to
build understanding over time
and across space.
And they have to do it in ways
that are not only emotionally resonant,
but structurally legible as signals
that systems can classify, verify, and retrieve.

That doesn’t mean the emotional arc
of your brand no longer matters.
It does.
It just now follows a different path;
one where before ever reaching a person’s senses,
it must first pass through those of a machine.
A machine that is constantly asking:
Is this message consistent?
Is it credible?
Does it align with what I’ve seen
from this brand before?
And does it align with the complex map
I have of exactly what my human
likes, wants and needs.

Welcome to the age of enhanced machine perception;
where choice begins by attracting a machine.
And doesn’t end until you’ve closed the sale
with an equally powerful appeal to
the human with the bank account.
You know, the one you used to
just have to make click.

In Killing Eve, the assassin, Villanelle,
doesn’t evade detection by hiding.
She does it through constant transformation.
A new accent. A different outfit.
A persona tailored to each setting.
Her skill isn’t stealth, it’s variety.
And it works because
the law enforcement systems built to track her
identify threats by spotting consistent traits
and recurring behaviors.
No pattern, no profile.
No profile, no match.

AI systems work the same way.
Their models are trained to classify
what they repeatedly observe.
So, when it comes to brands,
they look for linguistic patterns,
consistent descriptors,
and reinforcing messaging across a
wide range of content and time.
If a brand’s expression keeps shifting,
the model struggles to categorize it
and the end result is that
it doesn’t surface it at all.

Now, some brands have always operated this way,
with a voice that shifts by channel.
A story that varies by audience.
An identity that seems to evolve with every campaign.
And, while risky
(SEE the relative market values of Nike and Reebok)
there were some who saw such an approach
as clever. Adaptive. Even desirable.
But not anymore.
Now such fluidity will equal invisibility.

And this principle holds
even for brands built on fluidity.
If variety is part of your DNA,
it must be intentional, frequent,
and distinct enough
that the impermanence becomes its own pattern.
Google’s rotating logo works
not despite the change,
but because the change is rhythmic,
purposeful, and unmistakably theirs.
Without that level of structured variation,
the systems scanning for relevance
will pass you by.

Another obvious but easily overlooked point
is that, historically,
brands were designed for humans.
Built to evoke feelings.
Blue is calming. Green feels natural.
A casual voice suggests approachability.
Brand guidelines were sensorial roadmaps
engineered to leave a specific emotional imprint.
But now the audience at the top of the funnel
doesn’t feel anything. It just calculates.

In fact, when an AI agent “looks” at your brand;
whether it’s through a large language model,
a recommendation engine,
or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG),
it doesn’t browse your homepage,
watch your brand video, or scroll your Instagram.
It processes what it can ingest:
structured content,
recurring language patterns,
and authoritative references.

If your positioning shifts from page to page
or your language is poetic but imprecise
or your product categories are blurred,
you’re done.
If the machine can’t connect the dots,
it’ll just move on.
Because if it can’t confidently place you.
It won’t put you anywhere.
Not in summaries, answers, or shortlists.

But that doesn’t mean you need to oversimplify,
cram in keywords, or homogenize your brand.
It means your brand must be unambiguously defined
so its underlying patterns show through in the data.

Today’s world of pattern-seeking machines
makes the structural residue of your brand
more important than ever.
Every post, press release, and profile
contributes to a probabilistic fingerprint,
a traceable mark that either sharpens
the perception of where you fit
or pushes you into obscurity.
And while there are those who
might think this is a call for uniformity, it isn’t.

This is a call for intentionality.

Jeremy Bullmore once said,
“Brands are like bird nests —
built from scraps and straws
people gather along the way.”
This is still as true as when he said it.
The difference now is that the gatherers
are no longer apes searching for
things that catch their eye,
they’re algorithms in search of order.

And this means that while creative executions
will still close the sale,
what matters more than ever is the
brand strategy that informs the creative strategy
those executions are based on.
It must be clear, precise,
unchanging, unassailable, and unique.
In short, it must,
in a most unemotional (and machine-readable) way,
consistently tie every execution back to
who your brand is.
And why that brand is without equal.

All of which means that AI has given marketing
an opportunity to go deeper than the executional cleverness
a click-based world had fostered
and return to the clarity of purpose
that’s always been at the core of great campaigns.
In short, we have the chance
to look deeper at our offerings
and our audiences.
And in the process, identify truly foundational ideas,
the kind of BIG ideas
that link a human truth and
a commercial offering
and by doing so, turn businesses into causes,
customers into cheerleaders,
and brands into affinity groups.

Advertisings Hall of Fame is full of such work:
Dove soap’s recognition that women
would only ever feel as beautiful
as they believed they were,
and that as a major media sponsor,
their portrayal of real women
could play a role in shaping that self-perception.
Or Patagonia’s conviction that their business
existed to help save the planet
and that therefore all their actions,
from their materials to their messaging
to even their activism, had to reflect that. Such thinking changed those companies’ futures.
And the AI revolution could do it again.
At least for those with the courage
to put aside their emotional attachment to the click
and instead ensure they have a well-defined
and rigorously determined brand strategy
underlying everything they do.

The reality of a world where every asset,
page, and word you produce contributes to the probability map
that AI will use to decide where your brand ends up... or doesn’t ...
can leave anyone a wee bit uncomfortable.

But, it needn’t be overwhelming.
Because AI Recognition (AIR)
is anything but willy nilly.
In fact, like everything AI,
it is highly logical.
And that means you can dominate in this space
by following what we call
the 5 Rules of AIR Supremacy.

Over the years, brand strategy became more like “guidelines” —
dusty docs you made, stuck in a drawer, and forgot.
But now, with AIs evaluating everything you say and do,
having (and following!) a rigorously-defined,
clear brand strategy is key.
After all, today, if you swerve too far off-brand,
you don’t just lose trust, you disappear into the noise.
The algorithmic abyss of invisibility.

Great brands are built on great insights.
Who the customer is.
What they’re really buying.
And why.
LLMs can’t feel those motivations.
But they register the intensity of the conversations around them,
use that data to infer what matters to us,
and then decide which brands belong in that space.
So state your customer insight clearly.
And repeat it often.
Because if that insight gets lost,
so too may your shelf space.

Features can help close a sale.
But especially in an AI world,
they’re a weak opening act.
Remember, models are searching for people,
and people are searching for a change,
a hole (not a drill).
So lead with that change.
From stuck to soaring. Before to after.
And don’t just say it in copy.
Show it in your metadata,
case studies, testimonials,
even site architecture.
Because brands that bring their impact to life
are the ones that will make the shortlist.

AI systems don’t just see your public persona.
They pull signals from everywhere:
recruiting pages, product listings,
employee reviews, investor decks,
even your benefits policy.
If it’s in the ether,
it shapes how you’re ranked and recognized.
That’s why your entire org.
needs to understand your brand
and how to express it.
So don’t just roll out campaigns.
Roll your brand in
through sales, support, product, HR.
Make it part of the culture,
and harness the signal strength of every touchpoint.

Don’t just hang out in your category.
Follow the human truth you’re built on.
Seek out where the problem you solve lives.
If your insight is self-worth,
skip the soap aisle.
Find the articles where doubt gets discussed.
And the forums where your audience feels seen.
Be a participant, not just a sponsor.
Speak where your values feel native.
Because LLMs spot relevance by terrain.
And humans follow what feels understood.
So go where your brand story already belongs.

So, what’ve we learned?
Well, that for a brand to be recognized
in an AI-powered world
it must be based on an insight-driven brand strategy.
That that strategy must be expressed
in language machines can’t miss
and people can feel in their bones,
and that all of this must be pushed out
across every channel from ad campaigns to job postings,
investor updates to customer service scripts.
Because brands that do this
won’t just be a visible part of the conversation,
chances are, they’ll be leading it.

Of course, visibility isn’t everything.
And looking ahead,
the brands that will really thrive will be those AI sees
as being part of something even bigger.
So big in fact,
we’ve chosen to make it the theme
of Article 7, The Solution Economy.

This series wouldn’t exist without the insight, patience, and moral support of two people:

My beautiful wife, Cecile Engrand — the best event marketing CD I know — who was showing the world what was possible with AI long before the rest of us caught on, and whose strategic sensibility still grounds everything I do.

And my lifelong friend, Thomas Bolton — Princeton-trained, fractional CPO, and AI whisperer — who’s been my teacher, tech advisor, and intellectual sparring partner from day one. And the only person I know who’s building his own AlphaGo model … for fun.

Without their very human connection (and the help of my favorite LLM, ChatGPT), none of this would’ve come together.

All film references in this article are used under U.S. Fair Use Guidelines for the purpose of commentary, critique, and cultural analysis. All rights remain with the original copyright holders. If you’re a rights holder and wish to request attribution or removal, please contact me at LiamSherborn@gmail.com.