Your brand lost its point of view. You replaced it with a prompt.

Firstly I wanna share something, I don't write to produce articles.

Recently I hit a personal milestone with fifty of my articles being published through Inside Retail and although I'm immensely grateful for every one of them, the articles themselves were never the point. I always write because it's just how I think and how my brain works, I take an idea I half-believe in, pull it apart, test it against what I've actually seen and with consumers and find out whether it holds up or falls over, and what comes out the other side is a judgement I'd stand behind in front of a client who's paying for it.

The article is the by-product. The thinking however is the product.

I said that to a room of 500 people recently and I want to explain why it matters to anyone running a brand, because the tools we're all using now are very good at producing by-products and they don't care at all whether any thinking happened at all on the way.

AI is built to always skip the process.

A few months ago I sat in a range review where a young buyer presented a recommendation that was clear, well structured and completely right on paper, and when the GM asked her why and how she'd landed there all of a sudden she went quiet, the silence actually spoke volumes and it became very clear very quickly that she hadn't landed there herself, it was the tool she had used and she'd never had to walk the path or process the effort herself. Thank goodness nobody in the room was unkind about it, which was good but I was then surprised to learn it was because everyone in the room had also done the same thing.

Before we get to what's changing, we need to be honest about how people actually learn.

In my day, and I realise how that sounds, if I wanted to understand something I’d go to the library or on the internet and I’d gather everything I could find. Then the real work started, I’d unpack the information, compare it, break it apart and put it back together until it had what's called a schema, a structure and most of the time it was painful, it took energy and sitting in the friction until it anchored to memory. That anchoring to memory is what makes you an expert or well versed in understanding a subject simply because it took time for you to mine out, analyse and give it judgement in order to form an opinion and perspective.

The point I'm trying to make here is the friction and the process. The effort is what anchors the information to memory. It's the reason twenty-five years of doing that is what makes me an expert in retail and not just someone who's read a lot about it.

Ok so now here's what we do instead. We put the question and information into ChatGPT, or Claude, or whichever LLM we've settled on, and it goes straight to the answer. From question to answer with a cognitive bypass of the process of unpacking, comparing and all the effort that was required to actually digest the thing. A cognitive bypass straight to the answer, with the illusion of learning.

Because you never went through the friction, it might feel like you have the answer but it never actually anchors. You have the answer and you didn't learn anything, and from the outside those two things look exactly the same.

There's a line I was once told and it's this: advice is someone else's story, and the only way to find out what's true for you is to take in a lot of conflicting input and then check in with yourself, and if you don't know yet, you haven't done enough homework. AI output is someone else's story and at a massive scale, and the checking in is the exact bit your LLM tool takes away from.

I hate to say it but the answer looks identical whether you did the middle step or not. From the outside you may not even be able to tell the difference between someone who actually understands something and someone who just has a good summary of it, but that's the very dangerous trap I'm trying to highlight here.

Skip the thinking and you lose the judgement.

MIT ran a small sized study last year where people wrote essays with ChatGPT while wearing brain sensors, and the ChatGPT group showed the least brain activity by a distance and many couldn't even quote a line from the essay they'd literally just written. Now even though it's only a small study and I don't want you to over-think it, we certainly can’t ignore it either.

That's the cost. Not necessarily a worse answer today, the answers are normally not the problem, but the cost is that nothing got built in you while the answer was being produced.

Look, building the ability to make a judgement in business or life is no different to going to the gym. The first time you pick up a weight at the gym it's heavy and it probably hurt, but then, over time that same weight gets lighter, and the more you lift it the longer you can lift it for, and then one day you notice you're fit. Judgement builds exactly the same way. It comes from simply thinking and nowhere else, the brain rewires around what you make it do, so less thinking means less judgement, and in a world where everyone has the same tools judgement is fast becoming rare with many becoming more unfit by the day as we out source our thinking.

As thinking becomes rarer it means it becomes valuable.

Writing is how I keep the muscle from going rusty.

There's an old idea that was used by teachers and lecturers back in the 1950s to help students develop thinking for themselves and today it's a pyramid chart that’s super relevant when we think about society and what's happening. Thinking has levels. At the very bottom you have remembering things and understanding them, then repeat them and so forth up the levels, the higher up the levels, the fitter you need to be in order to apply them, and at the top you analyse, you judge, and you create something new or reinterpret an existing idea to create a new one. Dyson is a great example of create, they didn't invent something new when it came to vacuums, they simply deep dived into understanding what currently happens to reinterpret and come up with a completely new design and experience which changed the way we think and use our vacuums. To create or creativity is not a gift for the chosen few but one of the highest forms of thinking we have.

AI is brilliant at the bottom, it has the ability to remember well and summarise beautifully, and it can even assist or help you in the middle to mainly get you into this position faster. But the top three, breaking a thing apart, deciding whether it's right, building something that didn't exist before, that's still yours, and that's where real leaders live and where competitive advantage is today and in the future. This also highlights those roles that will get replaced by AI and therefore hopefully motivates you to get mentally fit so you won’t be replaced trying to compete. That unfortunately is not a battle you will win and AI isn't going to go away but you can survive by focusing on those things AI just can't do.

For me writing is what forces me up there every time, because you can't write a page about something you've only summarised, you get halfway through a sentence and realise you don't know how it ends, and that gap is the exact spot where the tool's answer stopped and your own understanding never started.

The published pieces aren't the work. The work is having a point of view and perspective about why people buy things that didn't arrive pre-finished from a prompt.

Ok now let’s think about your brand.

So everyone has the same tools now. Your range plan, your campaign, your customer emails, and your competitor's range plan, campaign and customer emails, all coming out of the same software trained on the same category, so everyone gets faster and everyone gets competent and everything comes out looking like the average of the sector. It's all commoditised and the fastest way to average.

All we end up having built is a very efficient machine for becoming exactly like the store or brand next door and have removed your opinion and point of view on what made you special in the first place. This change doesn't happen overnight either, I can already hear some of you saying “not me!” Yes, you too, it's slow and gradual, silent and you won't notice it till everything changes.

The point I'm trying to make about AI is simple, a brand built on AI has no point of view, it's the average of everything already said. A brand is and has to be the opposite of that. A brand is a point of view with a price on it, and every brand I've seen in trouble has lost its point of view, and every one that's winning can say what it believes in one sentence a competitor couldn't copy.

Let me wrap this up in one short paragraph. When everyone's capability is the same the customer still decides with emotion, and emotion follows trust, and trust isn't built by technology, it's built by behaviour, and behaviour comes from someone inside the business having done the thinking about what the brand stands for and what it won't do and then executing that behaviour through every single channel, decision and action.

The tool can't do that part and it was never designed to.

Three things to try today.

Before any brand work goes out, ask the person in charge to write the argument for it, one page, their own words, no tool. If they can't, the work has no author and your customer is going to feel it straight away.

Ask your team what the brand believes that the rest of the category doesn't and get it written down side by side. If the answers match your competitor's website, again you have a problem.

When the recommendation comes back from the software, just run the pizza test. The what? Two slices, which one tastes better to you. Nobody answers that by guessing what someone else would like, that's judgement, so if the room can't answer it about the recommendation, nobody in the room has one yet.

The tool isn't the enemy.

The danger is handing over the one part you can't buy back, sitting with a half-formed idea until you actually know what you think about it.

AI will continue to compress our thinking and thinking creates judgement. Less thinking, less judgement. It's that simple.

The brands that still have some thinking in the years to come won't be the ones with all the shiny toys and tech. They will have done the work to sit above the AI and technology and made space for friction in thinking it through themselves.

They'll be the ones where somebody still sat in the friction and the process, and did the middle step of learning the information on their own.

Nick Gray

About the author

Nick Gray is the founder of IGU Global, a Sydney brand strategy and retail consultancy, and was named a Top Retail Expert 2026 by Rethink Retail. With 25+ years across Nike, adidas, Diesel, Sneakerboy and Westfield, he works with startups, mid-size brands and enterprise clients on emotionally intelligent brand strategy, consumer psychology and AI's role in retail.

Work with Nick at iguglobal.com.

Frequently asked questions

Does using AI actually make you worse at thinking?

Not by itself, but it makes it very easy to skip the part of thinking that builds anything. When you take the answer without doing the processing, nothing anchors, and the more often you do that the less practised your judgement gets. It's the same as any fitness, you lose it by not using it, not by owning the equipment.

If AI gives good answers, why does it matter whether I did the thinking?

Because the answer isn't the asset, your ability to defend it is. When the answer is wrong, or the situation changes, the person who did the thinking can see why and adjust. The person who took the answer has nothing to adjust with. On a trading floor that difference shows up as a bad quarter, not a philosophical debate.

Why does my brand sound like every other brand in the category?

Because you're probably using the same tools, trained on the same category, prompted with the same kind of brief as everyone else, and the output is the average of what's already been said. A brand is meant to be a point of view, and an average has no point of view. If you can't state in one sentence what you believe that a competitor couldn't sign, the tool isn't the problem, the missing view is.

What's the simplest way to build judgement back into a team?

Make people write it down. Before any recommendation goes ahead, the person behind it writes the argument in their own words, one page, no tool. You'll find out very quickly who did the thinking and who has a good summary, and the ones who did the thinking get better every time they're asked.