Has AI exposed a problem lying dormant in your business?
Over the last year, we've found ourselves having the same conversation with a lot of our clients, and it's centred around AI. Some are using it to draft proposals, others are creating LinkedIn content, summarising meetings or simply trying to save themselves a bit of time during their working week. Sooner or later though, almost all of them end up saying the same thing, "It's really good but it just doesn't sound like us."
The problem AI has exposed
The more we spoke about it as a team, the more we realised AI hadn't really introduced a new problem at all, it had just exposed one that so many businesses have been living with for years.
If you ask someone in your sales team to describe the business, someone in marketing to show you a LinkedIn post, then ask the business leader to explain the company's value proposition, you'll often end up with three very different versions of the same thing. None of them are necessarily wrong, they're just based on the individual's own experience rather than shared guidance.
Until now, that hasn't been a huge issue because people fill in the gaps naturally, but AI can only work with what you give it or what it can find for itself. If your positioning, messaging and preferred language only exist inside the heads of a handful of people, it has no way of accessing or accurately using them.
Instead, it fills the gaps with whatever information is available. That might be some out-of-date website copy, a handful of Google reviews or content pulled from elsewhere online. If it can't find the answer, it'll produce one anyway, and there's no guarantee it'll be the one you'd want associated with your business.
Brand guidelines are becoming something bigger
It's surprising how many SMEs still don't have any brand guidelines at all, but let's park that for a moment and assume you're one of the businesses that does. Traditionally, they'll explain logo usage, colours, typography, imagery and perhaps tone of voice.
It's no longer enough to simply tell people how the brand should look, they also need to explain how the business should be understood.
That means including things like:
Your positioning statement
Your target audiences
How your services should be explained
The language your business uses
The words you deliberately avoid
The proof points or stats you always come back to
The challenges your customers are trying to solve
That's particularly important in SMEs because most businesses build that understanding through conversations rather than documentation. Everyone understands it because they've lived it, yet very little of it ever gets written down.
Ironically, if you capture all of that properly, there's every chance AI will follow your brand guidelines more closely than some of the people in your business.
Our brand guidelines no longer just define your visual identity, they capture the commercial thinking behind your business, becoming a single source of truth for everyone from sales and marketing to HR, finance and your AI agents.
Why we always start here
We know it’s tempting to shorten the foundational stages of a project so you can move onto the branding, the website or the campaign, because they’re the exciting bits. We’ve always encouraged clients to invest the time upfront, but that thinking is now more valuable than ever because it gives both your people and your AI a clear understanding of the business to work from.
Once your positioning, messaging and the way your business should be understood are clearly defined and captured in one place, all the uncertainty disappears. You're no longer relying on different people to explain the business in different ways or hoping new starters, suppliers or AI will work it out for themselves.
There's another advantage too, every future project now starts ten steps ahead because the hard work has already been done. You can start that website refresh you’ve been putting off because it feels like too much work, you can finally produce a concise sales deck that boils down your offer, and all your marketing campaigns are led by a central commercial message.
Just like that, everyone starts from the same foundations, tells the same story and finally sings from the same hymn sheet, with AI just becoming the latest tool to benefit from that clarity.
Where do you start?
If reading this has made you realise that a lot of your business knowledge still lives inside people's heads rather than in one place, you're certainly not alone. It's something we've found ourselves discussing with more and more businesses over the last year.
If you'd like to have that conversation, we'd love to chat. Whether you're starting from scratch, refreshing an existing brand or simply want to get the thinking that's already in people's heads down on paper, we'd be happy to talk through how we approach that process and the difference it can make.
In just a few weeks, you could have a central reference point, one that captures who you are, what you do, who you help and how you want your business to be understood. Your team will be more aligned, your proposition will be clearer, your marketing will be more consistent, and every new project will start from the same commercial foundations.
Whether you've been in business for a few months or fifteen years, there's never been a better time to capture what makes your business unique. The clearer you define it today, the more consistently everyone, from your team to your agencies and increasingly your AI, will communicate it tomorrow.
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