Beyond Copy and Paste: Martin Adams on Building Brands in the AI Era

When Efficiency Makes Brands Sound the Same

Generative AI has made content production faster and cheaper. Yet when companies use the same models with similar inputs, their messages begin to sound alike. At Professio’s MarTech Nordic 2026 in Helsinki, Martin Adams challenged marketing leaders to consider what this convergence means for the value of their brands.

Adams illustrated the problem by asking four AI systems to announce a Finnish company’s sustainability commitment. Their responses returned familiar language about pride, shared journeys and a more sustainable future.

“Even when you don’t try and copy someone, you end up with this kind of copy and paste outcome.“

For a CMO, this creates a tension between savings that are easy to measure and damage to brand equity that may be harder to see. Adams encouraged leaders to examine whether their use of AI strengthens the relationship with the audience or draws down the trust the brand has already earned. Lower production costs can conceal a loss of relevance.

Understanding What Customers Are Missing

Adams sees a more valuable role for AI in identifying what people want, what interests them and what existing products fail to provide. That requires looking beyond a company’s own customer records and product category into the communities and cultural interests that shape people’s lives.

He described work with L’Oréal’s NYX, where AI helped identify audience interests in goth romance, fantasy and science fiction. Those insights informed a product collaboration around Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. According to Adams, the product sold out within 24 hours without paid media.

The lesson for marketing leadership concerns how customer intelligence enters the organisation and influences decisions. Adams distinguishes the use of narrow, applied AI to understand demand from the use of generative AI to develop and communicate a response. Having an AI produce an audience description is different from analysing what an audience actually does.

A Brand Needs More Than a Prompt

Better market intelligence also needs a clear expression of the brand’s own standards. Adams argued that broad adjectives such as warm or personable give machines too little guidance. Leaders need to define specific rules and boundaries, including the actions and responses the brand would never accept.

“We need to set real boundaries. I would actually start with the boundaries.“

He suggested testing whether an AI responds differently to an unfamiliar trend when it has access to those brand principles. This gives teams a practical way to examine whether their guidance changes the output.

The Leadership Decisions Behind the Technology

In Adams’s approach, people remain responsible for deciding which signals deserve a response, what the brand stands for and which standards its output must meet. The work continues as customer interests change and new evidence reaches the organisation.

“You are going to need to find a new purpose for the AI that everyone else is using”

For marketing leaders, the opportunity lies in building an ongoing ability to understand the market and respond with a clear point of view. Competitors may have access to the same AI. The signals a company notices, the standards it sets and the decisions it makes can still give customers a reason to choose it.

Based on Martin Adams’s keynote at Professio’s MarTech Nordic 2026, Helsinki, 21 October 2026.