Love and logic: Brands in the AI era

Following the meteoric rise of AI, Nanne Bos, chief communications and brand officer at Aegon, argues branding is about securing relevance in the systems that guide human choice.

In the 1980s TV classic Knight Rider, Michael Knight didn’t just drive a high-tech Pontiac Trans Am, he bonded with K.I.T.T., the car’s AI voice and personality. Their connection was emotional as much as functional. Which raises an interesting question: was Michael loyal to Pontiac, or to the software that gave the car its soul?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. When I use ChatGPT in my own car, it does far more than fetch specs or directions. It understands context, picks up where past conversations left off and responds with something close to human empathy. Like K.I.T.T., it feels both useful and strangely companionable. And it makes me wonder: as technology becomes the interface through which people experience brands, who are consumers actually loyal to – the brand itself, or the intelligent assistant interpreting it?

AI as the new competitor at the moment of choice

A recent experience brought this home. While researching a new car, I skipped the comparison sites and told ChatGPT about my life: that I live in Amsterdam, often drive to the mountains, want something efficient but still full of personality. The AI assessed models, compared trade-offs and pulled from millions of reviews and real-world experiences, not just brand produced messages. It balanced facts with my emotional preferences, filtered the market and then filtered me.

At that moment, it wasn’t a channel. It was a competitor, shaping the recommendation set before I ever reached a website, showroom or ad. And if a brand isn’t present, relevant or machine readable in that critical instant, the AI will choose something else. Once a brand falls out of an assistant’s consideration set, earning its way back in becomes exponentially harder.

This shift reframes the challenge entirely. The question is no longer just “How do we persuade people?” but “How do we persuade the systems that advise them?”

Love brands in a world of logic machines

Great brands have always been built on more than recognition. They’re built on relationships. Kevin Roberts’ Love Marks highlights that enduring brands balance emotional connection (“love”) with performance (“respect”). Without love, a brand becomes a commodity. Without respect, a fad.

But in the AI era, the rules are being rewritten. Intelligent assistants simulate intimacy using vast archives of human language and behaviour. They learn from the emotional fingerprints we leave in reviews, conversations, and micro expressions. They mirror empathy, even if they don’t feel it. And they merge the rational, specifications, probabilities, prices – with responses that sound deeply attuned.

As these agents scale and personalise decisions in real time, customer commitment becomes less emotional and more functional: driven by relevance, convenience and integration into daily life. The challenge for brands is to encode their emotional value in ways that machines can interpret and recommend.

When data becomes the new brand canvas

AI collapses the space between data and feeling. It listens at a depth, speed and scale no human team could ever match. It evaluates brands not by slogans, but by signals: sentiment trends, user behaviour patterns, consistency of experience and contextual fit.

This is where liquid branding becomes essential.

Liquid brands for an AI mediated world

Liquid brands don’t live only in campaigns, packaging or visual identity systems. They flow through data structures, agent interfaces and decision engines. They are easy for intelligent systems to read, rank and recommend. They adapt to context, appear only when relevant and remain present in the loop even when invisible to the human eye.

A liquid brand is not just recognisable. It’s recommendable. It translates emotional equity into machine legible attributes: clarity, consistency, reliability, usefulness and distinctiveness encoded in data as much as in design.

In the age of intelligent assistants, branding is no longer only about occupying space in the human mind. It’s about securing relevance in the systems that guide human choice. To thrive, brands must become fluid, adaptable and legible – to both people and the algorithms acting on their behalf.