Why AI is an Opportunity for More Human Brand Communication
5 MIN READ
By Mima Tosic — July 14, 2026
Sign up here
|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Across every industry, AI is changing what it means to create. In the design sector alone, the market for AI-powered tools reached $1.11 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to $4.54 billion by 2030. For designers and brand managers, the question is no longer whether to use these tools, it is how to use them without losing what makes a brand worth remembering.
Earlier this year, I attended the NYCxDESIGN AI Summit at Cornell Tech. The tools we discussed are impressive, but what’s really exciting is what they’re forcing us to get better at.
Many of the conversations at the event centered on speed and scale. However, as a designer and creative at Certified Origins, I found a different prospect far more compelling: the idea that AI could actually make creative work more intentional, rather than less.
When everything looks good, nothing stands out
The numbers tell part of the story. According to Figma’s 2025 research, 78% of design professionals now use AI tools regularly. That means that the bar for aesthetically pleasing visuals is rising; ideation is faster, execution is easier, and polished creative output is within reach of virtually every brand.
That, however, creates its own challenge. When perfectly polished visuals are available to everyone, polish stops being a differentiator.
Adobe’s 2026 Digital Trends Report found that 63% of organizations expect AI to free up more time for strategic and creative work. The opportunity, then, is not in producing more, it is in using that time to produce work that actually means something.
What cuts through is not perfection. It is specificity. A visual language that could only belong to one brand, in one place, with one specific mission.
Designing with a purpose
For a brand like Certified Origins, that mission is specific: contribute to people’s enjoyment and health through good food made from wholesome, sustainable, and genuine ingredients.
It shapes every decision we make. And it raises real design questions: how do we communicate the importance of origin and traceability? How do we make visible the people behind the product?
For example, an image of an actual grove in Andalusia, photographed at harvest, does more work than any generated landscape. Not because it is more beautiful, but because it can be traced back to a real place, where real people work. AI cannot replicate that.
The opportunity for AI
The conversations at the summit were about exactly this. AI compresses ideation, speeds up brainstorming, and handles tasks that used to take days to complete. Used well, it creates space for complex projects that need more time and focus. That is genuinely valuable.
In practice, that often means using AI to explore a wider range of directions, faster than we could on our own. The tools help us see more options, including some that we might not have seen before. They do not, however, replace the human touch that makes a piece of work feel intentional and on-brand, rather than generated.
This tension shows up in the data. While 78% of design professionals say AI significantly speeds up their workflow, only 58% say it improves the quality of their work (Figma). Speed and quality are not the same thing.
What to watch for is the version where speed becomes the point. Where you keep producing because producing is easy. When that happens, it is worth slowing down and asking what the brand actually needs. Visual identity is an ongoing statement about what a company stands for. When it drifts, trust drifts with it.
How we use AI at Certified Origins
At Certified Origins, AI has become part of how we explore. We use it in the early stages of the creative process, to generate a wider range of visual directions, test concepts, and move through the ideation phase faster than we could on our own. What comes out of that process is never the final answer. Every concept is reviewed, challenged, and refined by our creative team against a simple but demanding question: does this feel true to who we are?
The tools have made us faster. They have not made the decisions easier. If anything, they have sharpened the conversations we have internally about what Certified Origins looks like, what it stands for, and what it should never look like. That clarity does not come from AI. It comes from knowing the brand.
Clarity over output
Knowing which direction is right for a specific brand, in a specific moment, for a specific audience, is not something you can prompt your way to. It is built from years of looking, making, and refining. Taste in the most practical sense: not what you personally find beautiful, but what genuinely serves the purpose.
A 2025 study published in Frontiers in Computer Science found that experienced designers working with AI consistently prioritized their own judgment over the tool’s output. Some used AI to accelerate visualization, not to generate solutions. Others discarded most of what the tool produced, saying it was overly ornate and got in the way of the final work.
Generation and judgment are not the same thing. The gap between them is where the real design work happens.
That is what this moment is asking of designers: knowing what is true to a brand and what just looks convincing. AI can do the latter. The ability to hold a brand together (to make decisions that are right, not just good-looking), has always been at the center of this job.
The brands that will hold their ground in this moment are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated tools. They are the ones that know what they stand for, and are willing to slow down long enough to make sure their creative work reflects that.
AI is raising the volume of visual content. What it cannot generate is meaning. That still has to come from somewhere real: a place, a person, a set of values that has been earned over time and is worth protecting.
For food brands especially, that is not an abstract idea. It is the difference between an image that could belong to anyone and one that could only belong to you.
The future of design is not about becoming more AI. It is about knowing what is true to your work and using these tools to get there.
Figma
Adobe
Human Agency
Evalueserve
Share on
