AI, Brand Trust, and the New UX

Adobe’s 2025 Digital Trends report for marketers and CX leaders highlights a crucial point that’s easy to overlook until it becomes a significant issue: people want visibility, control, and clarity — especially when AI is involved. 74% of consumers want brands to disclose when AI is used in content creation. That’s not a future ethic. It’s a current-day expectation, like “the app shouldn’t steal my data” and “the checkout should work.”

And it’s not just about disclosures. People can feel when a brand is hiding behind process.

You know the vibe. The emails that read as though written by a committee. The video that looks expensive yet feels soulless. The campaign with ‘insight’ that never takes a risk.

And if you’re wondering whether audiences actually notice — be honest: you’re scanning this paragraph for tells right now. The slightly-too-clean cadence. The polite transitions. The faint whiff of synthetic confidence like Dior Sauvage rolling out of a rental car. Everyone’s doing that now, whether they admit it or not.

The future is frictionless. Which means the experience of being marketed to is going to feel even more like ambient haze — unless brands earn attention with intention and care.

Not spectacle. Care.

(Okay. Sometimes spectacle. But if it isn’t in service of something real, it’s just a well-lit shrug.)

Refocus Payroll Around Human Judgment, Not Headcount Cuts

This is the part where a lot of companies go fully feral and start acting like the org chart is a nuisance.

Whether it’s AI, marketing automation, or whatever the next “frictionless” solution is, the move isn’t “replace the workforce.” It’s “reallocate the workforce” toward judgment-heavy roles. Automate the repetitive, and then — this is the part everyone skips — train and hire for discernment.

This isn’t some “save the humans” manifesto. It’s a practical reminder that creative quality still determines whether your budget achieves anything beyond moving numbers around.

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) cites Google and a MAGNA Media Trials study showing that creative quality drives a large share of advertising effectiveness. In fact, across multiple categories, creative quality accounts for roughly 56–70% of the impact on purchase intent in advertising. Weak creative doesn’t save money; it just pushes spend into other places to make the work function. More weight. More versions. More promos. More make-up spend to force mediocre work through the funnel. I’ve broken that pattern down more directly here: Why Bad Creative Costs More: Creative Quality and ROI.

Weak creative doesn’t save money; it just moves the bill somewhere else.

So yes, streamline production. Absolutely. Let the machines absorb the mindless tasks we never should have asked humans to do in the first place.

But if you cut the people who make calls about what matters, you’re not becoming efficient. You’re becoming indistinguishable.

Here’s the part that gets lost in the “AI replaces jobs” storyline: entry-level doesn’t go away. It changes.

We still need junior talent. We just need to stop training them to be human extension cords.

Entry-level used to mean rotoscoping until your eyes glazed over, or script coverage until you hated language. Some of that will still exist, but a lot of it shifts into something more valuable: managing systems, managing tools, managing quality — and learning what “good” looks like while doing it.

If a junior role becomes “tool wrangler,” that’s not inherently depressing. It’s only depressing if we treat it like UI babysitting.

The opportunity is to treat entry-level as the apprenticeship stage of judgment:

We should still train juniors to run the tools — but we can’t stop there. They need to learn how to spot what’s “off” before it hits a feed, why the choices exist in the first place, and where the line is between clean and right. Judgment gets built in those gaps. That’s the apprenticeship now.

Mentorship becomes non-negotiable here. Not as some warm-and-fuzzy culture perk, but as a supply chain problem for taste. If you want more judgment in your system, you have to grow it. Pair senior discernment with junior reps until the reps turn into instinct.

And if your AI plan doesn’t include that kind of mentorship, it’s not a plan. It’s a content faucet.

The C-Suite Double Standard on AI and Leadership Judgment

There’s another angle here that tends not to get voiced, largely because it’s awkward for the people who sign off on the slides.

One of the earliest and most effective applications of AI is in research, including pattern recognition, risk detection, scenario planning, and exposure mapping. Exactly the kind of work most executive teams outsource to consultants at $700/hour to get done slowly and overconfidently.

So if we’re being honest about the “AI can do the work now” narrative — why aren’t boards automating the C-suite?

You’d think we’d be clamoring to replace CEOs with a sleep-proof, emotionless, risk-adjusted algorithm. One that never gets starry-eyed about a pet project or sandbags a decision to save face. But we’re not.

Because we do believe judgment matters. We just pretend it doesn’t when it’s cheaper.

Leadership, at its core, is about choosing which risks to own, which tradeoffs to make, which fires to let burn. Those decisions require a human attached — not because humans are better calculators, but because someone must bear the legal, reputational, and financial consequences.

When things go sideways, you don’t wheel out the language model for the CNBC interview. You send a person to take the questions — and the hit.

That’s why it’s telling how quickly we’ve devalued that same type of judgment across the brand, marketing, and creative functions. We’ve automated the very roles responsible for brand meaning — the ones that require sense-making, discernment, and emotional intelligence. Then we act shocked when every brand starts to sound like a spammy LinkedIn post.

Let AI aid decision-making. Absolutely.

Questions about what your brand will stand for — and what it refuses to do — don’t belong in a prompt window. They belong with someone who can say, “We could. But we won’t.”

Premium Brand Storytelling: When Intention Matters More Than Polish

We’re heading into a weird era where “high production value” is, by itself, no longer a reliable signal.

Clean visuals are getting cheaper. Smooth motion is getting cheaper. Even competent writing is getting cheaper.

The new “premium” isn’t flawless craft; it’s work with purpose and nuance, where the intention is obvious even before the logo hits.

I used to say those words like they were a nice philosophy. Now they’re a filter you can run work through.

Does this have a point of view, or is it just well-produced?
Does this feel chosen, or simply generated?
Does this sound like us, or like a brand-shaped screensaver?

Because the easiest thing in the world right now is to make something that looks fine. It’s like hearing a Muzak cover of your favorite song while on interminable hold with your cell company. All the notes are there, with none of the feeling. That’s what happens when judgment’s missing — it looks right, but doesn’t land.

The hardest thing is to make something that feels inevitable — like only your brand could have made it.

Tools can help a team with intention make something great. They can also polish a lot of turds. And I mean that as a public service announcement: stop polishing turds. If the idea is hollow, the gloss just makes it easier to see.

A quick, slightly cursed cultural aside: “6–7”

If you need a metaphor for “spread without substance,” 2025 handed you one.

“6–7” went viral as a teen chant with no fixed meaning. It caught fire anyway. Harmless when it’s kids being kids.

Less harmless when it starts to resemble brand storytelling: catchy motion, borrowed aesthetics, algorithm-friendly cadence… and nothing you’d defend in a room of adults.

AI will make that style of output infinite.

Your only real defense is human judgment.

What CES actually reveals

CES is going to keep doing what it does: showcasing capability. And capability will continue to get democratized — faster than most organizations are emotionally prepared for. Whether it’s AI, robotics, 8K displays, spatial audio, or “smart” everything, the direction of travel is the same: the tools get cheaper, faster, and more capable. Judgment doesn’t.

So the competitive edge moves up the stack. Not in a consultant way. In a painfully practical way: from production to decisions, from output to intent, from “can we make it?” to “should we?”

The brands that win the next few years won’t be the ones with the most tools. Everyone has tools.

The winners will be those who can navigate a tool-rich world and still create work with a spine — because they have invested in taste, in standards, in mentorship, and in leadership that can make calls without hiding behind process.

The machine can do the work. It can’t do the job.

And if you’re tempted to squeeze payroll because the machine can “do the work now,” here’s the blunt version: The machine can do the work. It can’t do the job. The job is choosing what matters, protecting it, and repeating it with discipline until the market associates it with you.

That’s judgment. And it’s about to be the most expensive thing you don’t fund.