Tag: innovation

  • AI Is Making Personal Brands More Valuable, Not Less.

    It’s turning individuals into companies.

    One person can now write, design, research, market, build and publish at a scale that would have required a team not so long ago.

    That’s exciting.

    But it also creates a new challenge.

    If everyone suddenly has access to similar capabilities, how do people decide who to trust?

    Not by the tools.

    By the person behind them.

    Their thinking.
    Their perspective.
    Their judgement.
    Their reputation.

    The more AI democratises capability, the more valuable recognisability becomes.

    I’ve been thinking about this while helping a growing number of ambitious individuals and organisations become strategically clearer, visually unmistakable and harder to forget.

    Years ago I designed the personal brand and website for Professor Tanya Byron.

    The challenge wasn’t visibility. People already knew who she was.

    The challenge was creating a clear, consistent and recognisable identity around her expertise, reputation and public profile.

    Looking back, it feels like an early example of what we’re now calling personal branding.

    The tools have changed dramatically since then.

    The value of trust hasn’t.

    Perhaps that’s why personal brands are becoming more important rather than less important.

    As AI makes capability more accessible, reputation becomes more valuable.

    As content becomes easier to create, perspective becomes more valuable.

    As more people gain access to the same tools, recognisability becomes more valuable.

    People don’t just choose skills.

    They choose who they trust.

    That’s why I suspect we’ll see more individuals investing in their personal brands with the same level of strategic thinking, clarity and consistency once associated with companies.

    Not because they’re chasing attention.

    Because trust still matters.

    And trust has always had a human face.

  • AI is flattening creative skills, but judgement remains the value.

    Sceptical, fascinated and ultimately convinced, that the YOYOYO project from Google DeepMind and PORTO ROCHA is (perhaps inevitably) reinforcing the way I now approach writing and design.

    What stands out isn’t the AI. It’s the thinking.

    Sketches become concepts > Concepts become options > Options become decisions.

    The AI helps accelerate exploration, but creative judgment is still doing the heavy lifting.

    That’s quite close to how I use AI myself. More and more often, I’ll use it to rapidly visualise and develop ideas from my own pencil sketches and notes, and within BreifWrite, my AI-assisted pre-brief tool designed to bring clarity before the creative work begins.

    It speeds things up. But the quality of the outcome still depends on the quality of the thinking that went into it.

    Worth a look: https://www.yoyoyo.ai/