Artificial intelligence is no longer just a tool for marketers. It’s becoming an audience, a creative collaborator, and increasingly, a trusted companion to consumers.
In collaboration with Design Bridge and Partners, we hosted a series of roundtable events together senior marketing leaders from some of the world’s leading organisations to explore one critical question:
How should brands evolve when AI is increasingly influencing how people discover, evaluate, and engage with them?
The result is our latest report:
Two Brain Brand Building: How AI is reshaping what it means to build a brand, and what the world’s leading marketers are doing about it.
The Report Covers Three Core Pillars of the AI Landscape
1. AI as an Audience: From Ranked to Referenced
The traditional flow of search, find, visit, and convert has been fundamentally interrupted.
- AI overview features mean that 60% of search queries now result in zero clicks to source sites.
- However, visitors who do follow a link from an AI platform are highly intentional, converting at higher rates and generating twice the revenue per session compared to organic search.
- Winning requires Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) – optimising technical legibility for Brand Queries and building deep community authority to capture Category Queries.
2. AI as a Co-Creator: The Threat to Distinctiveness
While generative tools make creative production faster and cheaper, they present a massive risk to market differentiation.
- Backward-looking AI models rely on statistical averages, producing generic creative outputs that dilute identity.
- AI-generated content scores lower on brand fluency (76% versus 83% for non-AI content), meaning consumers struggle to correctly attribute the communication to the business.
- Protecting equity requires moving away from static design PDFs toward structured, machine-interpretable brand guidelines.
3. AI as a Companion: The New Recommendation Channel
AI usage is becoming deeply personal, converging on persistent memory and advanced personalisation capabilities to create consumer lock-in.
- This shifts consumer behaviour: 52% of teenagers in the US now regularly use AI for companionship.
- Platforms are leveraging a design pattern called “chatbait” – crafting responses to activate curiosity and extend time on the platform.
- As these systems evolve into trusted personal assistants, they become the ultimate recommendation engines, favouring brands with verified credibility and authentic resonance.
About tml Partners
tml Partners specialises in sourcing senior marketing and commercial leaders for ambitious organisations, including the calibre of talent that can navigate exactly the kind of structural shift this report describes.
If you’re thinking about how your marketing or commercial leadership team needs to evolve, we’re happy to have that conversation.
