Why brands must become liquid to survive in the age of intelligent assistants

In the 1980s TV show Knight Rider, Michael Knight had a deep relationship with K.I.T.T. — not just the Pontiac Trans Am itself, but the voice and personality behind it, brought to life by actor William Daniels. K.I.T.T. wasn’t just a car; it was a conversational partner, a trusted ally, and an integral part of the story. The technology was fictional, but the emotional bond felt real.  

Here’s the interesting question: in K.I.T.T.’s case, was Michael’s loyalty to the Pontiac brand, or to the software that gave the car its soul?  

I’ve been asking myself the same thing lately. When I use ChatGPT in my own car, it’s not just providing directions or specs. It understands context, remembers past conversations, and blends hard facts with a human-sounding empathy. Like K.I.T.T., it’s both useful and strangely companionable.  

When hardware and software merge so seamlessly, the emotional connection shifts. And that leads to the bigger question for brands in the AI era: your most important audience may no longer be your customer at all, but the AI advising them.  

AI as a competitor at the moment of choice  

I recently experienced this shift firsthand while searching for a new car. Instead of relying on review sites or dealerships, I told ChatGPT about my life: I live in Amsterdam, often drive to the mountains, want something efficient but with personality.  

The AI compared models, weighed cost versus style, projected long-term maintenance, and it didn’t just use the specs provided by the brands. It pulled in the opinions of millions of users from reviews, comparisons, and forums, blending them into insights I could trust.  

It balanced my rational needs with my emotional wants. It filtered the market, and then it filtered me.  It wasn’t trying to sell. It was trying to fit my lifestyle.

That’s when it hit me: AI isn’t just another marketing channel. It’s a competitor for influence at the moment of choice.

If brands ignore this shift, they risk becoming invisible at the very moment of choice. The AI will still make a recommendation — it just might not be you. And once your brand is absent from an agent’s recommendation set, regaining that place is exponentially harder than winning a human back.  

If the first principle of branding is to drive behavior and make choices easier, then AI changes the competitive landscape entirely.  

These intelligent intermediaries are now doing exactly that, at scale, with perfect recall, and without the emotional biases of human decision-making. The question for brands is no longer just “how do we persuade the customer?” but “how do we persuade the customer’s AI?”

And here’s where history offers a warning. Because when a brand focuses on the tools it has always used, rather than the essence of what it delivers, it risks losing relevance entirely. 

You push the button, we do the rest

At its core, a brand exists to do two things: drive behavior and simplify choice. Everything else — logos, taglines, campaigns, packaging — is just the delivery mechanism. Over decades, the most successful brands embedded themselves into people’s lives so deeply they became the default choice. That’s what made certain brands “love brands” — part of our identity, not just our shopping list.  

But history shows what happens when a brand confuses form with essence. Kodak didn’t just sell film. It sold the idea of capturing and sharing memories. Yet when digital photography emerged, it protected its form (film) at the expense of its essence (memory-making). The company had even invented the digital camera, but shelved it for fear of cannibalising its own business. It ceded the future to those who understood that preserving moments mattered more than the medium.  

Today, the parallel with AI is urgent. If your brand defines itself by its current medium — its ads, website, retail footprint — you risk repeating Kodak’s mistake. The real question is how to preserve your essence when decisions are increasingly made by algorithms on behalf of customers.

Love Brands vs. Logic Machines

At their best, great brands build more than recognition. They build relationships. In Love Marks, Kevin Roberts argues that enduring brands combine love (deep emotional connection) with respect (consistent performance). Without love, a brand is a commodity. Without respect, it’s a fad. Similarly, Aaron Shapiro in his book User Not Customer, reframes the relationship entirely: people aren’t just buyers, they’re participants in an ongoing, reciprocal exchange. Love brands invite involvement, create shared meaning, and reward loyalty with more than just points. They offer belonging.  

In the AI era, these principles are being rewritten. Intimacy is no longer earned solely through human interaction. It is increasingly simulated and scaled by algorithms that know more about users than they know about themselves. Growth is no longer linear. It is dynamic, as agents learn and adapt in real time to maximize individual outcomes. And commitment is often functional rather than emotional, driven by convenience, speed, and integration into daily life. The challenge for brands is clear: to survive in a world of logic machines, they must find ways to encode love and respect into data and interfaces, so that both humans and AI agents can recognize — and recommend — them.

How AI Merges Data and Emotion

AI systems may not “feel” in the human sense, but they are trained on an immense archive of human language, emotions, and behaviors. This training gives them an uncanny ability to simulate empathy, to mirror the patterns of human connection so convincingly that they can feel relatable, sometimes even more attentive than people.  

They do this by absorbing and synthesizing signals from countless sources at once. They learn from the words people choose when they describe a product, from the tone embedded in those words, from subtle patterns in purchase behavior, and from the way sentiment ebbs and flows across online conversations. They even pick up on micro-cues such as hesitations in speech, shifts in phrasing, and the emotional fingerprints we leave behind without realizing it.  

The result is a kind of perceived emotional intelligence. An AI doesn’t have emotions of its own, but it can infer yours and respond in ways that feel deeply attuned. It can merge cold, analytical facts such as product specifications, pricing trends, and statistical probabilities with the warmth of perceived understanding. It can reassure you, echo your excitement, or gently challenge your assumptions, all while pulling in the collective memory of millions of past interactions.  

This is where the competitive challenge for brands intensifies. Even the most customer-obsessed companies have never been able to listen at this depth, this speed, and this scale. AI collapses the gap between data and feeling, between analysis and rapport, creating a decision-making partner that is both relentlessly rational and disarmingly human in tone.

Why Brands must become liquid  

To remain relevant in an AI-mediated world, brands need to update their operating logic. The old playbook of shaping perception through campaigns and creating emotional bonds through stories still matters, but it’s no longer enough. Intelligent agents are now the gatekeepers of choice, and they operate on signals, data, and context as much as they do on human sentiment.  

That means the work of branding shifts from persuading people directly to being recommended by the systems they trust. To win in that environment, brands must design themselves to be easy for machines to read, rank, and recommend. They need to translate emotional capital into structured, machine-legible signals. They must ensure that their value, reliability, and appeal are visible not just to customers, but to the algorithms acting on their behalf.  

This is the essence of liquid branding. Liquid brands don’t live only in ads or packaging. They flow through data systems, agent interfaces, and decision-making processes. They adapt to context in real time, surface seamlessly when relevant, and disappear when not, always present in the loop even when invisible to the eye.  

Liquid brands are embedded, not broadcast. They are integrated into the workflows of both humans and machines. They are recommendable, not just recognizable, optimised for the criteria AI agents use to make choices. And they are emotionally resonant and machine-readable, combining human connection with digital fluency.  

In the age of AI, branding is no longer about securing a position in the minds of people. It is about being continuously relevant in the lives of people — and in the logic of the systems that guide them. 


About the Scriptorium Initiative

The Scriptorium Initiative is a nonprofit think tank exploring how artificial intelligence is transforming the future of human communication. Through research, convenings, and collaboration, Scriptorium helps leaders understand and navigate the profound implications of AI—not just as a tool, but as a new paradigm for trust, connection, and influence.

In partnership with Page, Scriptorium is working to equip senior communications leaders with the insight, fluency, and foresight needed to lead in an AI-native world. Together, we aim to produce actionable thought leadership, build frameworks for ethical and strategic engagement, and shape what responsible communications looks like in the age of intelligent systems.

Let’s keep the dialogue open - before the algorithms decide it for us. Learn more at www.scriptorium-initiative.ai