Like in many sectors, AI has had a big impact in branding and graphic design. Some agencies are using it to accelerate the research and ideation parts of their processes, while some clients want studios to incorporate AI assets. Some businesses just do it themselves, much to the horror of people who suffer from trypophobia.
But a less-often discussed impact is what AI's doing at the very beginning of the process, when a business is looking for an agency to develop its brand identity. The founders of small startups used to write personal briefs that could win them a talented creative agency at reduced rate if the project was interesting enough. AI-written briefs may be ending that.
Small design agencies have long been quietly subsidising the startup ecosystem. If a founder with big ambitions but limited budget pitched an interesting idea, an agency might take a risk on them if they liked the concept, hoping that relationship would pay off further down the line or provide a good portfolio project in a new area.
Daniel Hinde, founder of London agency Greatergood® Brands , argues that this approach has seen billions of first-time brands along the road to launch, but the it's now breaking.
"The nature of the briefs we're getting from startups has changed completely in the last year," he says. "It's gone from 'we're a startup and we only have X amount of money' to briefs that were clearly never written by the founder at all. They've been generated by an AI in a matter of seconds, and bulk sent to every agency sitting at the top of a Google search."
It's easy to see why founders would be tempted to use AI. Creating a brief to approach an agency requires time and thought. A chatbot can do it in seconds. You give it information about your product and serve, and it will generate a brief based on what it believes such a document should look like according to its training.
The problem is that there's no standarised brief that fits every business. And the kinds of things that big corporations need are very different to what a one-person startup needs to launch their brand.
"They're completely over-egged," Daniel says of the AI-written briefs he's received. "They'll ask for a full strategic proposal covering brand architecture, brand design, brand toolkit, packaging, retail strategy, go-to-market launch strategy, a website, a content plan, for a company that is genuinely one person and a £14.99 subscription to an AI model.
"A founder this size doesn't need a fraction of that yet, and often can't afford even one element of it, but the AI doesn't know that. It just writes the most comprehensive brief it can generate and fires it out."
AI can write the brief in seconds, and the startup can sent it out to dozens of agencies simultaneously. That might feel like efficiency, but, shooting into the void like that is unlikely to get the attention of the right agency. By using AI, business founders are forgetting that many of the best creatives are discerning when it comes to choosing clients: you need to sell yourself to them as much as the other way around.
"When a brief used to land from a scrappy founder, you could tell someone had actually sat and thought about their business," Daniel says. "That's exactly the kind of project we'd take a chance on. Most agencies will take a punt on a startup, perhaps the piece of portfolio work would be good and open a new category or new doors, perhaps we even just liked the founder on a personal level.
"Now nearly 90% of what lands from startups is impersonal, identical to what every other agency in the top ten search results is receiving, and asking for ten times the scope that startup actually needs. It's much harder to tell which of those founders is worth betting on."
“In addition, the AI models all have their set of rules for how we agencies should respond to this life-changing opportunity heading our way. At the end of each “brief” is the process and list of everything required to send our proposal. The result is that serious agencies will simply send a quote at the same costing which we would send to a global client group, not a startup. It’s either that, or we don’t respond at all.” – says Hinde.
It seems this is another area where a technology intended to make things faster and easier could be making things harder for the people it was supposed to help. Whether that trend reverses depends on business founders themselves. Daniel suggests the fastest way for a founder to make an impact on a creative agency in 2026 might be to simply write their own brief.
Daniel Hinde is founder and creative director at Greatergood Brands – a brand and packaging design agency who launch scale, and reposition consumer brands through strategic brand and packaging design.
