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Someone told me last week we're entering the era of critical thinking. AI handles the grunt work, frees the brain, and suddenly we're all doing our best work. I didn't even push back. Just sat there thinking — we're in our own bubble here. The people having this conversation are not the people this is actually going to hit.

The speed of this thing is genuinely hard to process. I've been vibe-coding apps for my own business that would have taken a development team six months and a budget I didn't have. That part is extraordinary. But I keep coming back to the same unease — not about what AI is doing to productivity, but what it's doing to the appetite for difficulty.

Creative thinking doesn't survive comfort. It's always come from being pushed into territory that feels slightly wrong, slightly uncertain, slightly too hard. The concern isn't that AI replaces the tasks. It's that it replaces the discomfort, and the discomfort was doing more work than we gave it credit for.

The brands worth paying attention to right now are the ones sitting with that tension rather than optimising their way out of it. You can build fast, build cheap, build at a scale that would have been absurd two years ago — and still make something with no soul in it whatsoever. Speed was never the hard part.

This week we get into what it actually takes to build brand soul when the default setting is to let the machine handle it.

In today’s issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

After three years of watching AI tools reshape how brands make decisions, I've learned something that might save yours: companies treating AI as a strategic master are about to disappear into the noise, while those treating it as a servant will own the future.

We're seeing this play out everywhere. Politics, economics, therapy, labor, creativity—every field has been directly affected by AI's rapid rise. Our social feeds, workflows, and strategies are now flooded with AI-generated content.

In this moment, it's crucial not to get drowned by immediacy or seduced by easy roads. And especially not to forget the basics.

Powerful concepts tend to lose their edge when they go mainstream. Brand soul is one of them. Like authenticity, disruption, and purpose before it, the term has been recycled so often it barely registers anymore. With AI now copying and amplifying everything we speak and write about, the dilution is getting worse.

But even when a concept loses power through overuse, its value remains high when understood correctly. Brand soul is one of those things every manager must prioritize if they want to protect their brand from the real dangers of this AI moment. It's the argument that validates your company's existence—the reason your brand does what it does beyond sales and quarterly gains. Not the foundation, not the cement, not the bricks—but the reason the building was ever worth constructing.

Brand soul is the starting point, the middle, and the end of every company's journey. It doesn't rely on your market, your audience, or any external factor.

Slowing down to remember that is now a competitive advantage.

A few years ago, I was talking to a dear friend about parenthood. She'd decided not to have children. When I asked her about it, she said her company was her baby—her tribute and offering to the world. With every decision she made, she was raising that baby toward adulthood, persevering even through hardship.

Your brand is indeed a living organism. It moves, speaks, acts, and decides like a person with a unique vision, unique behavior, and a soul.

Many people see this as a fantasy. For them, a company is just a sum of assets measured by metrics, offices, stocks, and quarterly financial results. Those business people are destined to be confined by the limits of the market.

Others understand it thoroughly. They return to the roots of why their company exists and what made them start this mad adventure of business parenthood in the first place. They had an idea that genuinely answered a specific need or contributed something of value to someone else. The answer to that call is what a company is.

Coming back to your brand roots is one simple act of resistance against the immediacy of AI. It's the treasure map you don't need to prompt because you've already been on the journey.

👉 Read the full piece

In 2021 Jaclyn Johnson sold Create & Cultivate, the company she'd built, for $22 million. The standard founder story ends there: the check clears, she becomes an investor, the slide goes up on LinkedIn. That's not what happened. Two years later, she bought it back—for roughly $8 million, a quarter of what she'd been paid—because watching people who didn't love it run it on autopilot was, apparently, worse than the money was good.

Keep that in mind. A company changed hands for $22 million, and whatever mattered didn't go with it. The new owners got the spreadsheet. They didn't get whatever made it worth buying, which is why revenue fell off a cliff under their watch, and why Johnson paid to undo her own exit. We'll come back to her.

First, the question worth the read: PepsiCo can formulate a soda. Church & Dwight can mix hand sanitizer by the tanker. These aren't hard products. So why did corporations that could build the product in a lab by Tuesday pay hundreds of millions—in one case, nearly two billion—to buy a woman's version instead? What's on the table that they couldn't make themselves?

👉 Read the full piece

Two months on the road and I've quickly learned there's no better filter for inspiration than physical movement. Away from the screen, walking through new cities, the references you stumble into in the real world hit differently than anything an algorithm serves you.

This month: The xx returning to Mexico City after eight years away — and why the choice of venue was the whole point. A new Banksy on a London street that a gallery would have completely neutralised. Renault's modernised Twingo and R4, which have no business being as good as they are. Two shops in Barcelona and Segovia stocking objects that feel like they were pulled from the cities themselves rather than a tourist board's idea of them.

Plus a Chrome extension that puts a cat between you and whatever social platform is eating your afternoon. Small intervention. Disproportionate impact.

👉 Check out the full inspiration list

Between Adolescence landing on Netflix and Louis Theroux spending a documentary inside the Manosphere, there has been no shortage of alarm about what young men are absorbing online. Every brand has circled that conversation for three years. Most said nothing useful and moved on. McCain — a frozen chip brand — found the one angle nobody else took. Not the crisis. The prevention. Not what's going wrong with young men, but the small, specific, slightly ridiculous thing a dad can do this week to stop it.

The answer adam&eve\TBWA arrived at — keep telling terrible jokes, the window is shorter than you think — is specific enough to be actionable and human enough to be true.

Why it matters: A frozen chip brand occupying this conversation sounds wrong until you realise they've been inside the British family moment for nearly a decade. The category puts them there genuinely. Most brands doing this are doing it because a brief told them to have a view. That gap is the whole story.

👉 Watch the campaign