The role of AI in branding is evolving rapidly. Canva’s 2026 State of Marketing and AI report surveyed thousands of marketing and creative leaders and shared some really interesting insights:
- Taste, intuition and strategy shape what AI amplifies.
- Moving faster only matters if you’re moving in the right direction.
- As AI becomes standard, it’s up to you to imagine how your brand will stand out.
The most fascinating part was getting a snapshot of how AI is performing in the real world.
It also just happens to support our philosophy that strategy isn’t optional, and it must always come before creation, whether you’re using AI tools or not.
The report’s key findings
Here are some of the headline findings:
- 97% of marketers now use AI tools daily
- 85% save at least four hours a week
- 65% of consumers say AI-generated ads are painfully obvious
The report is careful about how it frames its data. Not surprisingly, Canva is saying that AI isn’t the problem. They found that when advertising feels emotional, well-crafted and human-guided, consumers are genuinely receptive to it regardless of how it was produced. Seven in ten consumers say they prioritise the quality and feel of an ad over how it was made. The dealbreaker is poor creativity, not AI assistance.
This means the question businesses should be asking is not whether to use AI, but whether the work their AI is producing has the creative depth and strategic grounding to connect with people. And that takes you directly back to brand strategy.
The future of AI in branding and what it means for your brand
Canva’s conclusion that strategy shapes what AI amplifies is their central argument. The organisations that are getting a competitive advantage from AI are not the ones that adopted it earliest or invested most heavily. They’re the ones that have treated AI thoughtfully and guided it with a clear brand direction.
In practice, this means the purpose of a brand strategy has expanded since the introduction of AI.
- It aligns your team and guides your creative decisions like always
- And now, it also briefs your AI tools.
A well-developed brand strategy gives AI a genuinely useful brief to work from. If you share your carefully crafted positioning, tone of voice, audience definition and the specific way your brand thinks and communicates, the output better reflects the brand because the strategy is specific enough to direct it.
A vague brand strategy or no brand strategy at all does the opposite. It leaves AI producing content that is generic and ineffective.
Trust is a growing concern for consumers
The report identifies trust as an emerging competitive divide in AI-assisted marketing. The brands staying ahead are those:
- practising human oversight
- being transparent about AI’s role in their communications
- maintaining strong governance around how the technology is used.
This is both a compliance and brand issue. Consumers are becoming more sophisticated at identifying when content lacks human depth, and they disengage.
The brands that maintain genuine human judgment at the centre of their creative process, using AI to accelerate rather than replace that judgment, are the ones building the kind of trust that sustains long-term relationships.
Human oversight means the thinking that shapes the output is human from the start, and a person reviews every piece of output before it goes out. Strategy, voice, and creative direction are the inputs that determine whether AI-assisted content builds a brand or dilutes it.
How we think about this at Liquid Creativity
We’ve followed a strategy-first approach for over 30 years. Define, then design, then create. Get the foundations right, and every downstream decision becomes faster and more effective.
The Canva research confirms this in a way that is satisfying, not just because it validates our approach, but because the clients who invested in doing the strategic work properly with us are now in a considerably stronger position as a result.
The question we’re being asked more often now is how to carry that strategy through into an AI-assisted production workflow. We can tailor an approach to suit, but our hybrid model is becoming popular. Here’s how that model works:
- We do the strategic work that produces brand foundations specific enough to brief AI tools effectively.
- Then we help clients apply those foundations practically in custom GPTs and prompts so the thinking carries through into what their in-house teams produce on an ongoing basis.
The goal is to produce more quality content, and the brand gets stronger as volume increases. As the Canva report puts it, the organisations that win will be the ones that invest not only in infrastructure, but in judgment. That judgment starts with strategy.
If you’d like an honest external view of how your brand strategy holds up as a brief for your team and your tools, we’re always happy to chat.
