How AI is turning digital transformation into a brand-building superpower

A brand, at its heart, is nothing more than the living memory of repeated customer experiences. Each interaction, each product touchpoint, and each service moment contributes to this memory.

It's this accumulated set of experiences, repeated consistently over time, that defines a brand's true essence and builds lasting emotional connections.

Brand-building goes far beyond sleek logos or catchy ad campaigns. It starts with a relentless focus on genuinely solving customer pain points—issues the founders themselves have felt deeply and personally.

Take Zerodha, for instance. Founder Nithin Kamath didn't begin with aspirations of market dominance or flashy marketing. He was frustrated by high broking fees and cumbersome trading platforms and sought to solve these real problems.

His solution: a flat-fee broking and a seamless, intuitive platform. Users didn't just appreciate Zerodha; they loved it—so much so that word-of-mouth replaced the need for traditional advertising.

Similarly, when the iPhone first launched, Apple didn’t just unveil another phone—they solved fundamental frustrations around usability, functionality, and design. Consumers became advocates, propelling Apple into an iconic brand.

The real value of brand-building lies in crafting an experience so remarkable that customers can't help but rave about it. That deep-seated customer love, complemented by purposeful, impactful marketing—not just transient campaigns—is what creates enduring brands.

Experts in the field describe artificial intelligence not merely as another tool but as a universal capability that can seamlessly integrate into every product, making it smarter and more adaptive almost instantly.

AI's capabilities in enhancing digital systems are turning digital transformation into a superpower for brand-building. It is no longer sufficient to merely adopt digital tools—brands must deeply integrate AI to deliver personalised, meaningful experiences at scale.

Here’s how AI is revolutionising brand-building:

Memory that matters

Brands traditionally treated customer data as mere exhaust—information collected for basic reporting. AI transforms this data into perpetual memory, recalling every micro-interaction and using these insights instantly.

Imagine a retailer that remembers your past purchases and behaviours at every touchpoint, personalising interactions in ways that feel intuitive rather than intrusive. Customers don’t just feel tracked; they feel genuinely remembered.

A great example is Starbucks’ Deep Brew engine, which not only recommends offers based on purchase history but also explains why it did so—turning machine logic into a trust-building narrative.

Infinite creative imagination

Generative AI has turned the creative production model on its head. It enables rapid experimentation with infinite creative variations at minimal cost, allowing brands to match the nuance of individual consumer preferences.

Coca-Cola’s “Create Real Magic” campaign used generative tools to crowdsource and produce 120,000 AI-driven fan-made ads in days, showing how scale and creativity are no longer at odds.

This isn’t just about output—it’s about creative velocity. What once took months of agency work can now be ideated, tested, and refined in days. It’s not human vs. AI. It’s human plus AI.

Real-time dialogue

Traditional brand campaigns spoke at customers; intelligent AI-driven experiences speak with them. AI enables real-time, personalised interactions—whether through conversational chatbots negotiating personalised pricing or agentic systems dynamically optimising offers within defined brand guardrails.

Zepto’s growth is a testament to this. By focusing on real-time need fulfilment and hyper-responsive UX, they built not just a brand but a habit. The AI isn't visible, but it's everywhere in the system—from routing to offering customisation. That's what trust at machine scale looks like.

Learning at light speed

In my book Make Them Love It, I emphasise that genuine digital transformation isn't about incremental automation; it's about using AI and digital infrastructure to fundamentally reimagine your value propositions.

Whether it's leveraging AI-driven feedback loops for rapid product iteration or using machine learning to anticipate consumer preferences before they explicitly express them, brands now have the tools to make customers feel deeply valued.

Today's most successful brands follow a common blueprint: they sense customer needs proactively, decide on effective interventions instantly, create hyper-personalised experiences swiftly, and continuously learn and iterate. This agile, responsive loop generates genuine love from consumers, creating brand evangelists rather than passive customers.

Build an AI-ready brand system

To embrace AI-powered brand-building, organisations should:

● Establish a consent-driven, semantically rich knowledge graph. This ensures AI systems understand not just who the customer is, but what matters to them—ethically.

● Leverage retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enable real-time, contextually relevant interactions based on both static knowledge and dynamic behaviour.

● Define and codify a “brand genome”—a consistent, recognisable creative identity that guides AI content generation. Think of it as your brand’s tone, colour, rhythm, and worldview—structured for machine understanding.

● Deploy agentic systems with clear operational and ethical guardrails to create dynamic but controlled personalisation—at scale.

A 90-day AI brand acceleration plan

If you’re just getting started, here’s a tactical path to build AI momentum:

● Weeks 1–2: Inventory your data assets and ensure usage rights are consented and traceable. Clean, ethical data is non-negotiable.

● Weeks 3–4: Launch a RAG pilot focused on a single, high-friction journey—like returns, onboarding, or order status queries.

● Weeks 5–6: Roll out an AI-powered content engine for personalised emails, banners, or product descriptions to lower creative bottlenecks.

● Weeks 7–8: Introduce an AI negotiation chatbot in customer support, trained on your tone and guardrails.

● Weeks 9–12: Conduct a hallucination and ethics audit across all AI outputs. Brand trust is your moat.

From tech to transformation

Marc Andreessen predicts that the next wave of startups will be AI-first, re-founding entire industries. But incumbents don’t have to watch this happen.

By embedding AI into their core experience—not just their tech stack—legacy brands can behave like startups: bold, nimble, and surprisingly human.

AI doesn’t replace the human touch—it amplifies it. But only if you start with empathy, not efficiency.

Final thought

Digital transformation built the foundation. AI now brings the horsepower, creativity, and memory needed to make your brand unforgettable. It’s no longer about reach. It’s about resonance.

In the end, AI won’t build your brand for you. But it will make your best instincts—your customer empathy, your product sense, your creative brilliance—scale like never before. And if you use it well, your customers won’t just stay. They’ll love you.

One interaction at a time.

(Our guest author, Sameer Sankhe, is the Chief Digital Officer at Genesys International Corporation Limited. He is an inventor, tech entrepreneur, and strategy consultant.)