Avoiding the CommoditAIsation epidemic: Where to invest as a brand builder in 2026

Written by Fleur Horner, CEO The Value Engineers.

I am genuinely excited about AI. At TVE, we are building what I believe will be one of the most powerful AI workbenches in the industry. AI is not the enemy of great brand work. In the right hands, it is an extraordinary thing.

So I want to be upfront, what follows is not doom-casting. It is a strategist’s honest read of what is happening in the market right now, written because I care deeply about the commercial power of brand and I want the people building brands today to understand the implications of what’s happening.

I have spent a significant amount to time and energy arguing that brand is one of the most durable and high-return investments a business can make, it’s why I put together a whole panel of C-suite leaders last November to discuss how to get brand love into the boardroom. I believe brand is a genuine engine of long-term value and because I believe that, I think it is worth talking about what I’m observing that is currently putting that value at risk.

What is CommoditAIsation?

I’m sorry, it’s cringe and I can’t even blame AI for coming up with it, it’s how my cheesy, pun-loving brain works. In my head, commoditAIsation is the process by which AI-powered brand development fast-tracks the ubiquity of category norms, claims and category codes – both visual and verbal. It’s where everything starts to feel a little bit ‘samey’ and the distinctive brand assets that marketers are being told left, right and centre to defend at all costs become increasingly difficult to stand behind, shout about and ‘own’.

In the search for efficiency during brand development, I feel like we are at risk of sacrificing the things that actually preserve value over the longer term.

Dupes have always existed. In every industry, imitation is often the highest form of flattery and, where the original has already established recognisable brand assets, it can actually improve financial outcomes for both sides. Nobody really objects to collective demand creation for a whole category.

What I am seeing now though is different to the traditional ‘dupe’ and it is hitting emerging categories hardest. This matters because that is where so much of the most interesting product and design innovation (that co-incidentally enterprise brands use as inspiration) has always lived.

The scenario

The pattern I’ve observed is starting to establish in a few categories already (I’m looking at you olive oil, supplements and functional drinks!). This is the scenario I’m picturing – A brand needs to get to market quickly and doesn’t have the time or budget for developing robust brand strategy and design work (understandable). So it uses AI to help generate the claims, the marketing copy, the digital assets, the colour palette, the logo. Everything.

Trained to optimise for the highest probability of being ‘right’, the AI looks at other brands in the space, the target audience, the language used in reviews and press coverage, and produces something with the highest chance of mass appeal. The brand gets to market. It buys early-stage conversion success with a well-crafted performance marketing plan (probably developed with the help of AI) and maybe a sprinkling of PR.

And then the fast-follows arrive. Faster than they ever have before, and crucially, at a pace that means the original brand hasn’t had time to establish any real equity. Before those mental shortcuts have been wired in. Before the broader audience has even started paying attention.

The fast-follows play on the same codes, the same tone of voice, the same visual language, present in the same channels, with a very competitive price point at launch. The market floods. Consumers see ubiquity. And the original brand owner faces a stark choice:

• Go back to the drawing board and invest in brand and top-of-funnel activity, where distinctive brand assets are typically built, which feels like risk because sales will likely stall for a time or
• Spend ever-increasing amounts on conversion, buying their audience in a race to the bottom. CommoditAIsation complete, category and brand value in tatters.

Why this is fundamentally different

This is not a faster version of the duping that has always existed. It is a new landscape and a few things make it structurally unlike what came before.

Speed destroys the equity runway

Traditionally, even a fast-follower gave founders and innovators a window. The 18 to 24 months it took to develop and manufacture was meaningful time available for building mental availability in day 1 and day 2 audiences. That window is closing rapidly. The fast-follow now arrives before the original has made it past early adopters.

AI compression happens at the generative layer

Historically, a dupe was a copy of a specific thing. What is happening now is different: multiple brands are independently converging on the same AI-derived archetype without ever having looked at each other. It is not copying. It is parallel optimisation toward the same category average, which makes it much harder to litigate, call out, or even recognise when it is happening. As a consultancy this is somewhat ironic because our clients expect (quite rightly!) that while in contract, we don’t work simultaneously on the same projects with their competitors while also sharing information. There will be some nuances between outputs depending on the AI tools used but ultimately, this is exactly what is happening.

Emerging categories are disproportionately harmed

Established categories contain brands with deeply embedded distinctive brand assets that take real effort to erode. In an emerging category, nobody has established those assets yet. The whole category gets flattened before any individual brand can rise above it, and you end up with a sea of samey, emotionally-validating products that consumers correctly experience as interchangeable. If visual and verbal brand codes are undifferentiated and brand equity is still nascent, price and paid reach become the only levers left. That is the race to the bottom.

The strategic implication

The underlying problem is that AI brand tools are optimised for probability and ‘correctness’, not originality. They produce outputs that look right, that fit category conventions, resonate with identified audiences and use language patterns that have performed well elsewhere. That is genuinely useful. But ‘correctness’ and distinctiveness pull in opposite directions, and if you only ever optimise for the former, you sacrifice the latter.

Distinctiveness has become a first-mover advantage in a way it never quite was before. The window to include something genuinely unusual, an unexpected colour, a strange name, a tone that does not fit the category script, may be shorter than it has ever been. But the value of doing it is correspondingly higher.

The brands best placed to navigate this are the ones that move fast specifically on the brand layer, before the AI archetypes calcify in their category.

What I’m seeing is accidental (and very rational) individual self-sabotage. Each brand making a sensible short-term efficiency choice, the cumulative effect of which is a market where differentiation and distinctiveness has been designed out. I’m at risk of a whopping cliché but the answer has to be using AI with greater intent when it comes to brand building. Tasks like proliferating or localising assets for different channels, drafting copy, drafting briefs etc. big fat tick.  Invest instead in building a roadmap for creating genuine cultural resonance that isn’t solely built on what’s gone before, a real point of view, an authentic origin story, the kind of organised deviance that becomes mental short-cuts initially and distinctive brand assets later down the line.

The brand strategy of today

Brands that last are not built on the most average answer. They are built on a distinct and defensible point of view, expressed consistently over time. They have layers and depth. A narrative that rewards people for paying closer attention. Benefits, features and feelings that aren’t easy to rustle up in a few clicks. And somewhere in them, they all have something unconventional that probably shouldn’t work rationally, but somehow just does.

In a market where AI can produce the average answer at speed and scale, the commercial success lives in those that brands that have the ambition to build for a horizon beyond the buzz.