I ran an experiment last week.
Took a $30K brand strategy deck I wrote two years ago with positioning, messaging hierarchy, brand voice, the works. Fed it into Claude. Asked it to generate new campaign concepts in that brand's voice.
It took 47 seconds.
And the output? Indistinguishable from what the brand team would produce.
A junior strategist from my team, who will remain nameless as per her request, reviewed it without knowing the source. She called it "solid brand work."
That's the moment I knew we were fucked.
Not because AI is good at branding. Because the branding we've been doing is just pattern matching. And pattern matching is exactly what AI excels at.
And in 2025, most strategists are still pretending it isn't real:
Brand voice?
AI can replicate any tone with a few examples. The "authentic" voice you spent three months developing? It's a mathematical formula now.
Positioning frameworks?
Every brand archetype, every jobs-to-be-done map, every value prop canvas, AI has ingested millions of these. It can generate them faster and more consistently than you can.
Customer research synthesis?
AI can process thousands of customer interviews and surface patterns you'd miss. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't have confirmation bias. It just finds what's there.
Content creation?
An AI trained on your brand guidelines can produce on-brand social posts, blog articles, email sequences — all of it without a human strategist touching it.
The work you charge $15K for? Clients are getting 80% of that value from a $20/month Claude subscription.
And the gap is closing fast.
You're not competing with AI. You're competing with clients who realize they don't need to pay your rate when a machine can do the derivative work for them.
This is the part where someone always says, "But AI can't understand brand nuance! It can't capture the human essence! It can't do strategic thinking!"
Bullshit.
AI can't do original strategic thinking. But most brand strategy isn't original. It's applying proven frameworks to new contexts. It's remixing existing patterns and translating research into familiar outputs.
That's just execution.
And execution is getting automated.
The brand strategists who are still getting hired at premium rates in 2025? They're not the ones who are best at frameworks. They're the ones who do something AI fundamentally cannot.
Tomorrow, I'll show you exactly what that is. And why it's the only branding work that survives the next three years.
Reply and tell me: what's one piece of brand work you do that you genuinely believe AI can't replicate? (I'll tell you if you're right.)
— Shashank
P.S.
If your primary value is organizing information into branded formats, you're already obsolete. You just don't know it yet. The strategists surviving this? They stopped organizing information years ago.
Btw, you can hire me as a fractional chief brand officer for your business, and I’ll help you fix positioning problems that cost your company revenue.