AI-Ification Nation
April 23, 2026
An AI skill tells the agent how to do something. The most-used one I’ve built so far is /humanize-writing. It makes AI output sound more like human language, more like my personal voice and with nuances I feel are important for warm, professional, clear communication.
This skill runs against things like an email draft to a client providing an overview of a pitch deck, taking a long-form essay and turning it into a LinkedIn post, aggregating multiple client assets (transcripts, reports, bios) and spitting out a structure for our copywriter to turn into a story.
A human will always produce the final piece of content from BEST because that’s part of the authenticity you’re paying for. The skill, the agent, the tool just helps us get there faster. It helps us operate better. And in the words of Morgan DeBaun¹, it has taught us to think about how to think differently.
BEST uses Claude to run competitive analysis, to catch disconnects in a brand narrative, to take the emotion out of feedback, prepare for meetings, research campaigns, identify holes in a scope of work, aggregate metrics on engagement, or simply create timelines. We use Granola to take and dev our meeting notes. We use ChatGPT for quick qs. Etc, etc.
For a lean studio like ours, Claudette in particular has been a game changer. It’s given time back to every role on our team, helping us uphold our core values—alchemy, function and ease. We’re still system thinkers with a problem solving mindset.² This just enables us to solve more problems with better systems.
Dress for the Job You Want
McKinsey projects AI will add $2.6–4.4 trillion in annual GDP. By next year, every tool you touch will have agents built into it. By 2028 $750 billion in U.S. revenue will funnel through AI-powered search.³ Brands that are unprepared could see a decline in traffic from the traditional search channels by as much as 50%.
AI pulls from the past, from what already exists. It's a pattern-matching engine running on yesterday's data. Which means it can't give you vision and purpose. It can't take a creative risk. It can’t read the room, fully understand the cultural reference, and make a call that changes the direction of a project.
Being prepared looks like having a body of work, a clear point of view, content that AI can find and reference. Being a brand that already has a clear, trusted reputation in place.
As the market keeps pace with each new capability, it will be essential for brands to lean on creatives they trust. Those who have knowledge of the landscape, and enough critical thinking ability (and care) to discern when to delegate and what for. You want a partner you know is optimizing their billable hours without cutting corners.⁴
Most of our clients encourage us to use AI, but have no idea how. Often in practice this looks like a messy brief we end up questioning or even rewriting. BEST is actively developing our Studio AI Policy as a vetted source of truth to work from. Similar to how we level set on Accountability, being a strategic partner, not just a deliverable machine, is a differentiator.
The Real Flex is Taste
I think it’s human nature to want a cure-all life hack—just scroll your Instagram feed. We’re all exhausted and burnt out and starved for community connection. Which is why it’s important to call AI what it is: a tool. An innovative, time-saving, at times therapeutic, tool. It is an extension that can either help you be a better human, a better brand, a better company, or the opposite.
Strategist Lynn Juang⁵ said, Things have to evolve and change, sure, but I think because technology has allowed us to accelerate parts of the process, we end up trying to accelerate all of the process. Without respecting the time it takes to get more precise, we take shortcuts which ultimately backfire in my opinion.
Producing and creating are two different verbs. AI has allowed anyone and everyone to produce at an extremely bloated rate. As tech accelerates, it’s essential for creatives to protect how they think. We need to not only preserve our taste, but refine it at the same time as we are keeping the machine oiled in the background.
We’re in an AI-generated feeding frenzy—and I loved how icon Elise Loehnen⁶ put it—the chum is thin. The chasm between those who can work the marketing funnel and those who spend their time making original things will continue to widen. It’s unclear how much A.I. will expose/exacerbate or fill that gap.
I have yet to see a piece of creative produced by AI that can match anything to come out of BEST or a seasoned designer. From what I’ve seen the output looks….pedestrian. And to be clear, pedestrian might be fine for some of you. Pedestrian is even better than what you’ve been doing if you’re in the business of pushing produced content.
Rachel Karten noted in her recent piece⁷, Leadership is being sold a future where creative work is done by AI agents and moving at reckless speeds to not get left behind. Meanwhile, marketing teams—and I am sure teams across many industries—are feeling increasingly dehumanized and unsatisfied in their roles because of the way AI is being implemented without any vision or care.
The chum is thin, this is where the discernment piece comes in. While BEST is happy to have onboarded Claudia as part of our family, she has a way to go before moving into the C-Suite. There are plenty of Studios offering expert guidance on how exactly to use AI to replace your creative department.
My job is not to teach you AI. It’s not to take a stance on whether or not you should use it for your brand kit. My job is to learn where it can add time and value to the creative intelligence BEST brings to our clients. To determine and define how BEST shows up as a creative partner in this new era of oversaturation.⁸ I am responsible, as I have always been, for both keeping integrity and humanity in the work and for using strategic critical thinking to employ whatever tools make more space for that to exist.
To borrow from Claudette’s draft⁹ of this newsletter, if you need a brand that thinks, just say the word.
¹ My favorite of the AI Course Coaches. I also like this guy Ruben, here's his Substack post on Claude for Dummies.
² AI Gave Me My Imagination Back, Anna Noelle Rinke
³ Brands vs. Bots, Fast Company
⁴ Refusing to Accept an AI-Poisoned Future of Journalism, Marisa Kabas
⁵ Lost In Translation, Lynn Juang
⁶ What Are We Doing Here?, Elise Loehnen
⁷ Does Your Boss Have AI Brain?, Rachel Karten
⁸ Backstory's Creative Leadership in the Age of AI Webinar
⁹ My Prompt to Claude:
Hi Claude - I'm going to write BEST's April Newsletter on Ai. Below are all the notes I have been gathering around it. First, I would like you to take a pass at this based on what I've provided, and the back knowledge you have on the studio and our BEST Kept newsletters. Use the humanize writing skill for this. I will eventually compare your first draft to my (our) final newsletter to find ways which we can improve our writing and voice together.
Claude's Draft of this Email:
McKinsey projects AI will add $2.6–4.4 trillion in annual GDP. By next year, every tool you touch will have agents built into it. The question for creative businesses isn't whether to use AI—it's whether you'll let it think for you.
Have you noticed how much of what you're reading online lately feels… the same?
Same cadence. Same vocabulary. Same frictionless, sanded-down tone that could have been written by anyone or anything. And increasingly, it was. The New York Times recently issued a retraction tied to AI-generated content—a signal that even the most established institutions are stumbling over the line between efficiency and editorial integrity. Brands are pumping out synthetic content at a pace that would've been unthinkable two years ago. CMOs and ad agencies are openly wrestling with how to market to (and alongside) AI systems that now mediate what audiences see.
The flood is real. And it's making originality more valuable, not less.
Elise Loehnen put it well recently: the chasm between those who can work the marketing funnel and those who spend their time making original things will continue to widen. AI might expose that gap, or it might fill it temporarily with volume—but there's a real possibility that the chum gets so thin, so diluted by what it's ingesting, that people find themselves gravitating back toward primary sources. Toward the real thing.
That's where the opportunity lives for brands willing to do the work.
Your Voice Is Your Moat
AI doesn't have taste. It can approximate tone, mimic structure, produce something passable at speed. But it can't tell you whether the work is good. That discernment is yours, and it requires a level of self-knowledge most businesses haven't formalized.
You need to be precise about what makes your voice yours. What's the point of view? What's the vocabulary? What gets said, and just as importantly, what doesn't? If you haven't organized that infrastructure—your brand's creative DNA—AI will default to the average. And the average is getting more crowded by the day.
This is where the Creech model resonates. Ashley Jones and Griffin Creech built their studio around the conviction that language and design should develop together from day one, not as an afterthought. "If a designer isn't working with good language early on in the process, what they do use might mean nothing or even distract from the design," Jones told The Brand Identity. That precision about words, about positioning, about what a brand says no to—it's the same muscle you need to wield AI well. You have to know what right looks like before you hand anything off.
The Partnership Problem
There's a trust question embedded in every AI conversation that doesn't get enough airtime. When do you delegate, and when do you stay hands-on?
Anna Noelle Rinke wrote candidly about how AI gave her imagination back—freed her from repetitive operational thinking, helped her make decisions faster, passed more responsibility to her team. "It has absolutely made me better at operating," she said. And the part that stuck with us: "I previously put myself in quite a box of being a systems thinker with a problem-solving mindset—and while I still am these things, I now am that and more."
That's the best-case version. AI as a thinking partner that expands what you're capable of. But it only works if you're clear about what stays human. Morgan DeBaun framed it well—the real value is using AI "to think about how to think differently." The moment you hand over the thinking itself, you've lost the plot.
What AI Can't Build For You
Reputation comes from showing up with good, smart business ideas that provide ROI, and doing it consistently enough that people trust you. Synthetic content doesn't get you there.
AI pulls from the past. From what already exists. It's a pattern-matching engine running on yesterday's data. Which means it can't give you vision and purpose. It can't take a creative risk. It can't sit across from a client, read the room, and make a call that changes the direction of a project. It can't decide that your studio won't take on alcohol brands because of personal conviction, the way Creech has. It can't build the kind of long-term relationships that Mary MacGill described to us in February—where customers grow alongside the brand because the brand bothered to design for lifetimes, not transactions.
Vision, innovation, leadership, relationships, well-being decisions, strategic thinking. These are the architecture of trust. And trust is what separates a brand from a content machine.
"AI can help you package your credibility," as Maha put it. But you still need the credibility.
Respect the Clock
Lynn Huang said something that's been rattling around in our heads: "Things have to evolve and change, sure, but I think because technology has allowed us to accelerate parts of the process, we end up trying to accelerate all of the process. Without respecting the time it takes to get more precise, we take shortcuts which ultimately backfire."
She's right. Speed is seductive, especially when AI makes it so easy to produce. But producing and creating are different verbs. The brands that will win the next few years are the ones that use AI to handle the operational weight (pricing alerts, comparative analysis, scheduling, first-pass research) while protecting the time it takes to do original, considered work.
Mary MacGill uses AI for "unsexy but critical work" while keeping brand voice, the handmade process, and relationship-building human. That's the model. Use AI to scale and structure. Use it as an extension of your team, a tool that earns its seat. But don't confuse what it produces with what you create.
Every tool will have AI baked in by next year. The differentiator is going to be who kept their standards while using it.
This month's newsletter by Alison + Claudette. If you need a brand that thinks, just say the word.
