This image generated is indeed AI-first :)
I've honestly lost count of how many company profiles, websites and pitch emails I've seen this year leading with "AI-powered."
AI-powered marketing. AI-powered SaaS. AI-powered creative. AI-powered consulting. AI-powered, AI-driven, AI-enabled, AI-first. Pick your prefix, paste it on the homepage, charge 30% more and expect us to be impressed.
I am not impressed. Nobody I work with is impressed. The leaders you're trying to win over are sitting in the same meetings I am, rolling their eyes at the 17th pitch this month that opened with the exact same sentence about ‘an AI-native solution designed for real impact’.
To be fair, it did mean something. Briefly. About twenty months ago, if you put AI on the front of a B2B product, people leaned in. Now it's wallpaper, and it’s peeling.
And the funny part is, while the entire industry is doubling down on it, the actual buyers and consumers are quietly losing interest. A recent Fractl and Search Engine Land study showed consumer trust in AI tools has dropped from 82% to 54% in twelve months. A decline of 28 percentage points in a single year!
54% of Gen Z said a brand using AI in its marketing would make them trust it less, not more.
84% want AI-generated content clearly labelled.
The market is moving on but the pitch decks and creatives aren’t catching up.
Let me be upfront about something here. I use AI tools every day. They help me think, draft, research, push back on my own arguments. I'd be a hypocrite to pretend otherwise but there's a sizeable gap between using AI to do better work and positioning AI as the work itself. I mean, why read this memo if I could just automate it being written and delivered by an AI tool every Monday, and not from actual Manuja? 🙃
My point is if your differentiator in 2026 is that you have access to Claude, I have slightly difficult news for you, dost. So does the teenager next door building dashboards every hour. The tools, your AI-nativeness, your MCP Mastery isn’t the positioning; it never was.
IMHO, the agencies, brands and businesses that will win the next few years are the ones using these tools invisibly, quietly, deliberately. The pitch deck still made by humans with taste and a point of view, just better and faster than before. Because now more than ever, nobody is buying your AI prowess. They are buying your judgement, your eye, your thinking. AI just happens to be in the room while you do it.
So, use the tools. Just please don't make them your entire personality.
M.
M’s Currents
A small thing I loved this week: no structure or theme, just sharing some favourites.
Music: This super chill playlist keeping me cool in this tar-melting, glass-fogging, humanity-questioning heat. Enjoy the jam.
xx
Manuja
Not for everyone. Never was.
