A brand is still a company’s most valuable asset. It’s an intangible collection of signs, symbols, colors, behaviors, and voice, which never shows up cleanly on a balance sheet. You build it cumulatively, and when it finally comes together, it drives real business value. It’s why consumers pay more for a certain phone, sneaker, or pill. It’s why people choose you, again and again.

Until recently, people built this asset. Founders, business leaders, marketing teams, and the people on the front line interacting with customers shaped what the brand stood for and how it showed up.

Increasingly, people don’t meet your brand directly. They meet an AI’s version of it through an LLM’s summary, an agent’s comparison, a generated image, or an answer that shows up before your website loads. According to recent research from R/GA’s forthcoming Agentic Commerce report, 64% of consumers have used AI to research a product or service in the past three months. A brand used to live almost entirely in what a company said and made. Today, AI agents increasingly influence how brands are represented and how consumers experience them.

The marketing industry’s first instinct has been to treat AI as a production opportunity. Large holding companies and creative infrastructure players have spent the last couple of years plugging brands into generative pipelines to churn out assets, driving gains in output and efficiency that, when you look at the bottom line alone, might look like success.

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