cybernetic meadow — where machines and nature coexist in harmony
a “cybernetic meadow” where machines and nature coexist in harmony. Decades later, Dario Amodei borrowed that vision in his essay “,” describing a world where a century of biological progress compresses into a decade. His frame—a “country of geniuses in a datacenter”—is as useful for understanding brands as it is for science.
I trust Dario’s thinking more than anyone in this space. His idea of “marginal returns to intelligence” suggests we’re nearing a threshold where the difference between human and superhuman intelligence becomes practically infinite. My question: what happens when that intelligence turns its attention to the cultural work of building brands?
Your brand now lives on TikTok, LinkedIn, Slack, storefronts, and a thousand other places simultaneously. And yet brand guidelines still ship as rigid PDFs, as if culture moves at meme speed, but brands can afford to move at the pace of quarterly reviews.
What took Coca-Cola 130 years to build will happen to new brands in five.
The Breaking Point
Jaguar’s recent rebrand shows the cost of this mismatch. Months of work and half a billion dollars produced an identity that erased heritage in favor of generic minimalism. It landed with a thud. Customers felt betrayed, the launch was meme fodder. Sales tumbled—down 27% in the UK, and nearly halved globally. Executives resigned.
The fallout reveals the challenge facing all brands today: cultural trends now move faster than brand processes can handle. Brands are drowning in complexity while their tools remain static. Guidelines sit in 300-page PDFs no one opens, while approval workflows crawl. Jaguar’s new identity didn’t just miss the moment, it missed what made its brand memorable by a mile. In trying to stand out, the brand became unrecognizable, alienating its core audience and becoming a cautionary tale.
Traditional brand management assumes a world that no longer exists—one where messages could be carefully crafted, tested, and deployed in controlled environments. Today’s reality is different. Every touchpoint is a potential flashpoint. Every piece of content carries cultural risk. Billion-dollar companies are managing their most valuable asset with tools from 1995. say marketing matters more than ever, yet many are firing their CMOs for lack of ROI. Brand has never mattered more, and yet it has never been managed worse.
Jaguar brand (pre 2024)
Jaguar rebrand (2024)
Marginal returns to intelligence
Yet the inverse is also true: one well-placed insight can change everything. Dario makes the case with the concept of “marginal returns to intelligence” that intelligence becomes the scarce resource that unlocks exponential progress. The same is true for brands. Emily Segal and her collective proved this with a single cultural read that reshaped fashion for years. That’s the law of marginal returns to intelligence—outsized gains from the right idea at the right time.
In brand, endlessly piling on more research, data, and smart strategies doesn’t always translate to better outcomes. Instead, breakthroughs rely on the brilliance of a few strategists, creatives, or researchers. But their bandwidth is finite. When companies turn to generic AI, the gap only widens. ChatGPT doesn’t know your blue is a promise, not just Pantone 286. It can’t tell the difference between clever and offensive, between resonance and trivialization. What it produces isn’t real strategy but an echo, an illusion of coherence that feels convincing until it’s tested in the world, where it falls apart.
The view from the front row
I’ve watched this unfold since early 2023. First it was individuals using ChatGPT to write emails. Then whole teams were uploading brand books to consumer AI tools—each getting slightly different answers about what their brand stood for. By 2024, strategy decks and campaign briefs were being run through generic AI, producing five hundred versions of the truth and zero alignment.
The cycle repeated everywhere: teams rushing to adopt, IT departments panicking, enterprises deploying Copilot as the “safe” alternative, then trying out custom “brand bots.” Most now sit abandoned because they knew PowerPoint, but didn’t know the brand.
The scariest moments happen in the gaps. While IT departments were busy drafting policies, brand teams had already uploaded years of strategy to OpenAI via personal accounts. One company discovered their team had been using AI for months—shipping ten times more content while nearly publishing a campaign that would have offended multiple cultural groups. Caught only by luck, not process.
Strategy decks and campaign briefs were being run through generic AI
Lessons from engineering
The software engineering world faced a similar inflection. Six months ago, engineers debated whether paying for AI tools was worth it. Today, adoption is universal—and at the frontier, AI is building AI. Anthropic now uses its own systems to develop the next generation of models. after discovering its engineers were using it to prototype against their own models. The lesson for brand teams is clear: the tools evolve faster than the playbooks.
Engineers adapted by becoming , structuring their codebases so that AI could not only generate code, but understand the reasoning behind it. As , context engineering is “less like operating a scientific instrument and more like mastering a musical one”: it’s about communicating clearly enough that a model can act with the same shared understanding you’d give a human collaborator.
Brand builders today face the same challenge. By treating their voice, values, and cultural positioning as machine-readable context, they can unlock intelligence that works with them, not against them. And on the marketing side, a parallel role is already emerging: the . Content engineers don’t just write copy; they design the scaffolding that scales narrative across every channel. Together, context and content engineers point toward a new discipline: brands built as systems, not just stories.
Jonathan Anderson’s final Loewe campaign
Foundational Brand DNA flowchart
Building a country of geniuses for brands
Dario imagines a datacenter full of geniuses revolutionizing science. What if brands had the same? A collective intelligence that knows your brand as deeply as your best strategist, but can process cultural signals and consumer sentiment in real time.
That’s what we’re building with brand.ai. Not another tool to manage, but a living operating system that grows with you. A brand that understands its own voice so deeply it can speak authentically across any channel, any moment, any cultural shift. Instead treating your identity as just another dataset, we create dedicated intelligence trained exclusively on your brand’s DNA—voice, values, visual system, strategic framework. The result is AI that knows your brand specifically.
For the first time, we can build brands that evolve as fast as culture moves, personalize at scale without becoming fake, and exist everywhere without becoming generic. This is what brands of loving grace looks like.
Building a country of geniuses for brands
The next decade
Today, only Fortune 500s can afford great brand management. Tomorrow, a startup in Lagos has the same tools as Nike. When execution is perfect, the winners are the ones with something meaningful to say.
Here’s what I see coming:
- In two years, brand updates happen weekly, not annually.
- In five, real-time cultural adaptation is baseline, not a differentiator.
- In ten, static guidelines feel as quaint as fax machines.
We’re at the beginning of a transformation that will reshape how brands are built, maintained, and evolved. The timeline is compressed—what might have taken decades will happen in years. The brands that recognize this shift and adapt accordingly will have an enormous advantage over those that cling to old models.
It won’t all be smooth. Some experiments will break. Some AI outputs will offend. Cultural drift will happen, just as every trend evolves once it goes mainstream. But ignoring it isn’t an option. The alternative is irrelevance.
The winners won’t be those with the biggest budgets. They’ll be the ones who pair human judgment with machine intelligence to create living systems—brands that can move as fast as culture while staying true to themselves.
The cybernetic meadow Brautigan imagined was about finding harmony between human values and technological capability. For brands, that harmony means preserving what makes them distinctly human while embracing the intelligence that can help them thrive in a complex world.
Brand has no final state—it’s always becoming. But with the right tools, we can create brands that don’t just survive this transformation; they lead it. If we build AI that truly understands brands, we won’t just make marketing more efficient. We’ll make business more human.
If you’re tired of treating your brand like a PDF while culture moves at meme speed, let’s talk. We built Brand.ai because we couldn’t wait for someone else to solve this. Now we’re looking for brands ready to solve it with us.
