When AI starts improvising with your brand
If 2024 was the year everyone played with AI, 2025 is the year it moves in, starts doing our laundry, and rearranges the furniture without asking.
Give it an inch, and suddenly your rock-solid finance brand sounds like a Pinterest quote crossed with a cat walking across a keyboard.
This is the new reality: when the bots can produce ready-to-publish content before your morning coffee kicks in, a clearly defined brand shifts from being a nice-to-have to a non-negotiable.
Welcome to the age of needing tighter visual, voice, tone and messaging boundaries than ever before. Exciting? No. Important? You bet.
AI Isn’t the problem. AI without rules is.
The bots aren’t trying to tank your brand.
They’re just doing what they they do best: generating. But with no regard for ASIC, APRA, your risk team or your carefully crafted guidelines circa 2017.
Brand guidelines narrow the lanes so AI can do what it’s brilliant at without blowing up consistency, trust or your risk appetite.
What good brand guidelines actually look like
If your brand guidelines are currently sitting somewhere between “vibe-based” and “aspirational,” AI will expose that weakness immediately.
One thing we see again and again is brand guidelines that look great in the deck but fall apart the moment real humans try to use them.
They’re often high on adjectives and low on the practical detail teams actually need to make decisions across email, web, in-app, social, service scripts and beyond.
If people can’t interpret your brand clearly, AI has no chance. It will magnify ambiguity and invent the bits you haven’t defined until you end up with homogeneous beige slop.
We’re talking visuals, too
The industry is already experimenting with tools that promise to take your brand playbook and churn out “on-brand” creative in seconds. Some platforms even claim to take your entire brand bible and auto-generate campaign-ready assets with the right look, mood and message.
You won’t be surprised to hear that we’re raising an eyebrow at those claims, having seen the quality of the output first-hand.
AI can follow rules, but it can’t yet invent the rules that make a brand unforgettable. It can mimic your aesthetic, but it can’t sense when something feels a bit off, a bit flat or a bit “this technically ticks the boxes but it has the charisma of a tax invoice”.
Versions, variations, layouts and production are where it shines.
If recent experience is anything to go by, asset generation will get more accurate, more controllable and more useful over the next 12–18 months. That’s great news for efficiency. But you still need actual creative brains to define what good looks like.
AI-proofing your brand guidelines
Without tight foundations, AI fills gaps with generic defaults, which is where brand drift (and compliance risk) begins.
Here’s our take on today’s non-negotiables (with apologies to The Bear):
Brand voice library
Approved phrases
Banned phrases
Tone examples (“sounds like this/not like this”)
Emotional cues (how customers should feel)
Brand aligned writing samples
Prompt libraries
Context
Who your customers are
What they’re worried about
What they value
Their cognitive biases
Their behavioural patterns
Your positioning
Your core beliefs
Your promise to customers
Your history and milestones
Visual identity guidelines
Colour system with “allowed” and “never use” variants
Typography with usage rules
Layout heuristics (spacing, composition, hierarchy)
Photography guidelines with specific AI-safe prompts, if approved for use
Regulatory boundaries
What constitutes advice
What claims are off-limits
Mandatory disclaimers
Risk appetite guardrails (“never imply certainty,” etc.)
A simple brand governance framework that won’t make you want to cry
If AI touches it, you need to guard your brand like it’s the door to Boutique in 2005.
Keep it simple:
Update your guidelines. The more context you provide, the more aligned you can expect your output to be if it (or your team) goes anywhere near AI.
Map the approval pathways for AI generated output. What needs sign-off? What doesn’t? Who’s the decider?
Audit regularly for drift. Diarise a quarterly review: Are we still looking and sounding like us?
This framework gives teams flexibility inside clear boundaries, which is exactly where creativity thrives.
The bottom line
If you want your brand to stay sharp in the age of infinite content, don’t leave the door wide open. Set clear boundaries and make sure every AI-made piece actually belongs.