S07.EP14 - Brands, Bots, Buyers: How AI Is Changing Brand Choice with Asha Parmar

0:00The sense of self is derived from the stories we tell ourselves, right? Built from this very active process of reflection, introspection, participation. When that's getting outsourced, what does that mean for how we understand ourselves, what we align to, our sense of what we value, and what does that mean then for the relationships with brands?

0:24Hello and welcome to Just Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Kass and Matt Davies.

0:42Before we get into today's episode, I want to invite you to something special. I'm Jacob Kass and this September 8 to 11, I'd love for you to join me, Matt Davies and more than 40, yes, 40 of the world's leading brand strategists, designers and marketers at the free Brand Builders Summit. Across four epic days, you'll get inspiring keynotes, live Q &As, workshops and panels designed to help you build better brands and a stronger creative business. Reserve your free ticket at brandbuilderssummit.com. That's brandbuilderssummit.com. Now let's get into today's episode.

1:24Matt Davies:Hello, folks. Welcome to this latest episode of Just Branding. This one is going to be exciting. We are going to be pushing the boat out on that, you know, lovely buzz phrase of AI. And before everybody groans and dies inside, right, this is going to really shift your mindset. We have with us the most amazing person to discuss this with, this Asha Palmer. She's an award-winning insights leader with a decade of experience in global research and strategy at the intersection of culture, audience, brand, and product innovation. I asked Asha before this, can I drop some of the people that she's been working with into this bio?

2:04Matt Davies:And she said, no, Matt, because I'm so, so wonderful. I'm NDA'd. But put it this way, folks, she's worked with some of the top AI brands out there to kind of uncover consumer intelligence in this new age of AI. She's been advising those leading tech companies around AI search, consumer behavior and agentic product development. So she is the perfect person for us to tap into today. I've just got a couple of other notes that say that Asha has built a global footprint in the industry from conference stages to podcasts. She's recently received wonderful awards from Green Book and Women in Innovation for her contributions at the frontier of AI and innovation.

2:48Matt Davies:And today she is the founder. How do I say this, Asha? I should have probably checked with you before. I'm going to say Elan Intelligence, but is that correct? It's technically from a French word, but that works. Elan Intelligence, yes. Elan Intelligence. What confused me, folks, is there's a little squiggle above the E. and being a language ignorant person. I don't know what that means, but Elan Intelligence, so E-L-A-N, Intelligence, a boutique consultancy focused on AI and consumer brand dynamics. That was probably the worst introduction I've ever done, but welcome, Asha, to Just Branding. Thank you, Matt.

3:25Just, I guess, to clarify, Elan in French means momentum. So I think a lot of what I've been focused on is as the big variables are shifting, what does that mean for human behavior and the dynamics between consumers and brands and how do you find and forge path forward and maintain that momentum so that's really where the idea of the

3:44Matt Davies:name came came from love it love it we're all about momentum here on just branding as jacob will testify to before we get into this um i just it'd probably be worth just saying like me and uh asha have a funny story because asha i think you thought i was in new york and you were visiting new york weren't you and you were like people i think you we'd been uh you know connected for a while and you were like hey like let's meet up for a coffee and i was like yeah i'd love to meet up for a coffee but you're it was a most bizarre bizarre message where it's like i'm in new york would you like to meet up for a coffee i'm like uh i'd love to but i'm in south wales in the in the uk so that's gonna be tricky and that but we decided to have a conversation didn't we because this is a this subject of how consumer dynamics is changing is you know on the forefront of at least my mind as a brand builder.

4:31Matt Davies:And you're right there at the cutting edge. So I'm really thrilled that you agreed to follow up our conversations and eventually come on the podcast. So thank you. Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Matt. I think really where my story begins with all this, I've spent the last decade in a kind of combination of consumer insight, brand, I've dumped around, like many of us in the in the industry have sort of taking little leaves out of the different playbooks. Most recently, I was specializing in tech sector, working with sort of some of the biggest tech names at a big agency in New York. And then AI happened, right?

5:06AI sort of exploded onto the scene. And I found myself completely enthralled with what was going on, how that was changing the way that consumers behave, what's it doing to our psychology, and the way that we and the possibility for how it changes the way that we relate to brands and interact with them. So that's sort of a bit of background as to how I got here. What I found really sort of surprising to begin with is that so much of the conversation was really around AI efficiency gains. How do we optimize process? How do we cut costs? And we were sort of pretty distracted from the bigger strategic opportunity, at least as I saw it.

5:43And that's really what led me to ultimately go independent and start this business where, you know, there's a lot to unpack in terms of the mechanics of how consumers work and what that means for brand strategy.

5:57Matt Davies:That is so smart. And that's why I think this is going to be really interesting because I think you're right. Like I go to lots of conferences and speak all over the place. And the mistake I see a lot of businesses focusing on, if you like, they don't think it's a mistake. This is just the way they think. Is they're exploiting what's already there, if that makes sense. So what they're doing is they're looking at what they're doing already. and they're thinking, how can we make this better? How can we save money? How can we fire half the sales team to cut wage bills? How can we build digital workers and agents to basically do what we do right now, but with agentic AI?

6:36Matt Davies:Which is fine, right? I mean, I don't know what your thoughts are, Asha. I kind of think that kind of makes sense. But what I love about what you're saying there is that that's not the big picture here. There's a bigger picture around customers and consumers and the way that behavior is shifting. Now we are presented with, I guess, you know, artificial intelligence that can support the consumer. Is that about right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think, as you say, Matt, I think it makes sense. It's a very logical place for people to start. It's super tangible. We can optimize things. We can immediately see the return on whatever we're cutting, whatever we're optimizing.

7:13so it makes sense I think the challenge with AI is a that it's changing so quickly like keeping up to pace with what is what is actually happening in the developments of these tools is not really a minefield but it's it's happening so fast that you sort of have to be immersed and really close to it to even get a sense of what might be happening in the bigger strategic picture and because of that and because it's so murky I think there's a lot of sort of ostriching right heads in the sand as to well what does this ultimately mean and and that's why I've decided to go super niche on it because I think you need that genuine immersion to actually understand what's changing to apply it to what that looks like in terms of consumer behavior and then to extrapolate that onto not only what does it mean for brand building as a sort of fundamental discipline but what does it look like category to category and I think you know again there's so many variables that are part of it that's why i've sort of decided to go go in quite niche on it

8:13Matt Davies:smart so in terms of changing consumer behavior perhaps we could start there and like how would you sort of describe that shift you know i know you're fully immersed in this and a lot of people in the on the podcast will be fully familiar with some of this but let's just sort of start simply and then we'll build the complexity into the conversation yeah so i think let's start at a sort of before we get into brand specifically right like when we look at the the data on ai usage and in daily life in personal life i mean even this is data this data is maybe even a little old a little old now maybe six months old but you know taking europe as an example you've got more than like four in five people that are using ai in daily life whether that's for work whether that's for sort of personal planning moral reasoning which i'll come to come to a little bit later why am I being ghosted that sort of thing you know it's it's already become such a big

9:07it's already become like such a sort of fundamental part of people's lives and it's yes it's a tool but it's become a lot more than that in in people's life it's become a companion has become like a bit of a trusted friend right when we talk about this sort of moral reasoning or relationship guidance even and so it's got influence over the way people think how they behave what they're doing where they spend their money and that's really where brands come into the picture so I sort of wanted to level set on that sort of broad behavior before we get into it when we look at actually how it's come into decision journeys into the sort of brand mechanics we've got again this this data maybe you know is a few months old but you've got like more than two and three European consumers at least I'll use that as a bit of a bellwether for now that are using it upstream in the in the journey so in in in learning about a category and discovering new brands products in evaluation in comparison and it's particularly high in the more sort of research intensive categories perhaps that's not not super surprising but yeah and I'll use a personal anecdote here it's not just young people so my my parents were planning a road trip to Canada to go and visit my sister who lives out there my dad texted me a few months ago saying you won't believe this but I've just used chat gpt he had they had sort of super specific needs for this road trip my sister was joining for some of it they wanted to sort of they had some flexibility on certain dates you know all these sort of very nuanced specific needs that in the end he was going mad trying to use google for this he just put it all into chat gpt and he ended up booking somewhere that was recommended by chat gpt he did it through booking.com but he he went for somewhere that was recommended by TapGPT because it allowed for him to kind of come with that super nuanced, highly contextual intent signal.

10:55And that's sort of what I mean, where I've sort of written about the sort of decision journey or the funnel collapsing. It's not necessarily that it doesn't exist anymore, but that it's being compressed, right? So you have so much of the activity, so much of that upfront process happening within one interface, within one surface, that by the time somebody comes to interact with a brand that they're coming much closer to the decision point so that it raises interesting questions around how much influence or flexibility a brand has over those earlier touch points when so much of it's being mediated through these these platforms that's such a great

11:34Matt Davies:point i i've got another like there's loads of studies out there aren't there but one of the studies i found quite interesting was one from stanford and again it's probably a little bit old now but the what they found was that this is 2026 so it's this year uh stanford 2026 ai index report if you want to look it up it found for example that 53 percent of the population that they interviewed which was us i believe they had they basically had 53 adoption within three years okay so this is over over half the population within three years had adopted ai and it's probably gone way up now because it was earlier this year but why that's amazing is just to give us all kind of a bit of a pause for breath is that's faster adoption of a technology than any other technology that humanity has ever seen so like faster than the personal commute computer even faster than the internet right across the world's population so 53 percent now of us across the world at least 53, it's probably gone up, are using AI.

12:37Matt Davies:So that's like, that's like mental, like next level. And it's mildly scary, right? Because as you say, Asha, like if it's affecting behaviour, right, like, you know, that's very worrying. It really is. I like to think that there's a lot of governance in place, but I do worry that it's not. We'll get to that. Yeah, we'll definitely, I definitely have some opinions and thoughts around, you know, what the governance and what it means in terms of, you know the data that it's trained on and what that means for power and things like that but yeah I mean as you say it's it's being adopted so quickly it's changing behavior so quickly and that's where I think there's a sort of oversight or short-sightedness within brands even within agencies that like there's so much to understand and unpack and stay on top of as to how this is changing and what that means for for the dynamics between the brands and the consumers and i say dynamics i know it's maybe not a super common term but i think it's more than it's more than the relationship it's more than the interactions we have this sort of unpredictable unknown entity now that is mediating it this sort of go between that no one has control over you know that the brands certainly don't have control over that consumers are it's sort of refracting their experience of of the brand and i think and in matt we've talked in the past about narrative control and i think that's a really really even for ip lawyers right this this extends beyond sort of people in-house and in brand teams to the sort of legal ramifications and i don't want to walk myself down a legal rabbit hole here because i don't know too much about it in terms of ip law but when we think about how the the narrative around a brand is refracted through these systems and what that means in terms of lack of control it raises questions around well how do brands keep building equity nowadays when there is this intermediary right and this intermediary so this is something that i've been thinking about a lot for some of the projects i'm on the intermediary i'll tell you a little story actually so one of the the classic things that i do within leadership teams is obviously to try and start think help them think about the consumer at the end of the cycle of what they're doing, right, as they're building their brand.

15:00Matt Davies:So my work is very customer-focused. And so I was working with a project. It must have been about eight months ago. And one of the things we do is create ideal customer personas like at the top level. So I do it with the leadership team, right? And I bring research and I say like, who are we trying to orient? Who are we serving, right, as a business and as a brand? And we're going through this exercise. It's all classic, typical kind of exercise. And I'm in this workshop and someone says, yeah, but we've got another persona that no one's thought about yet. It's like, what's that? It's the agents.

15:34Matt Davies:I was like, what the heck? How do I build a brand persona like for us to speak to agents? And they were super passionate about it. And I just thought this person was off their heads. Anyway, I went away and thought about it and thought, actually, this is actually true. Like exactly what you were saying. I still haven't quite cracked how I build a persona for an agent because the agent, in effect, becomes, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this, my agent, like, you know, my chat GTP, if I'm losing it at low level or even if I've got an agent, is a manifestation of what I've put into it, roughly, you know, and I've kind of framed it and it wants to please me.

16:11Matt Davies:So it knows my values, it knows how I think, it knows the quality and what I want from whatever product I'm trying to buy. So it's kind of a reflection of the ideal consumer. But there's one massive difference, which is that, this is how I see it, it can research at lightning fast pace, make decisions without really consulting me based on its assumptions about me at lightning fast pace. and therefore i'm i'm starting to use this term like ai enabled consumers right so it's like say let's i'll give you a quick example let's say like i'm super into you know the climate change and the planet and stuff and and minimizing my carbon footprint is a huge deal to me my agent will know that so when i go and say to it what lawnmower should i buy right it's going to be like okay i know matt's super keen on the environment and it's going to be not only assessing price quality size of lawn all the things that it might ask me about but it's also going to be thinking right what's going to be the most energy efficient what's going to be the most green option and then make recommendations and it may not even mention to me hey matt i've recommended this because it's an electric lawnmower and actually the carbon you know that'll help you with your carbon footprint values it might just it might just offer it up at you know as as a thing and that's the kind of the the the dynamic shift i think we might be witnessing saying like with your dad's example like he wants to plan a trip etc etc it will know certain things about what your dad values and enjoys in life that might start offering those up as part of the itinerary it might not say on day three i've offered this particular restaurant because i know you're a massive fan of fish but it's it it will do it so is that the sort of shift that you're seeing and the sort of things that you're starting to think about and how do you think about some of those things that i've mentioned yeah so i think i'm so glad that we're talking about this so i think one thing that i want to maybe clarify is that llms your chat gpt's your clauds is not the same as an agent agents are so new they they're really like piloting in the u.s at the moment they've actually not really sort of made headway yet over here in the UK and Europe.

18:31So I think a lot of what I've been talking about so far relates to people using LLMs, for example, or AI enabled experiences within brand interfaces. I will come to agents in a second, but I just wanted to start off there. So as you say, there's a sort of part of the LLM that has got to know me, that knows sort of the the kinds of ways that I ask questions, the things that I value, it has built some sort of picture of who I am. There's also the part of it and this here we sort of get into, well, how does this sort of recommendations process work in this sort of AI black box? And the sort of question of how does that machine equity, as I like to call it, work?

19:11So just to take a bit of a step back, a lot of the machine sort of mentions and recommendations come from a couple of things. So there's the sort of part that the brand can control, which is how is my native data structured? Is my brand narrative consistent across different touch points, across my different surfaces? Is it machine legible? So when somebody comes to an LLM and says, I'm looking for a brand that is XYZ, that offers XYZ, is my data clear enough to be able to read that need, interpret that from my native content and say, hey, there's a match here. This brand answers that specific question or need that that person has.

19:51That is part of it, but it's not the biggest part. the sort of major part of how these machines recommend is actually from third-party UGC right it's going to when you see on chat GPT or on Claude when it's sort of scanning through those different sites that it's pulling the responses from you'll see Reddit come up a lot because Reddit is a massive citation source that it references and so we have this the situation where actually the human equity that brands build where you have consumers being vocal about the brand on socials on reddit that is actually informing the machine equity what it ends up recommending and suggesting so you have this sort of interesting cycle where you obviously brands need to keep building equity with people as they have done in the past but not only is that just to build that mental availability the emotional resonance everything that we know already about brands but actually now that feeds into how the machine equity is built when it's reading about sort of what how people are being vocal about the brand on things like reddit and that is feeding into it it's then of course overlaying it as you said with this sort of persona that it's built of you as the user in terms of what you value so there's so many sort of things that come into it parts that the brand can control as i said how the data is structured on their native content but then things that they can't control, which is what are people saying about the brand online?

21:21And how do those marry up? Is it consistent? So I think that's why I talk about human and machine equity and that sort of being the new mandate that brands have to work towards because it's no longer just the human at the end, it's the machine at the end, but they share a lot of commonality and root in how to build that equity.

21:40Matt Davies:I'm so pleased that you clarified a couple of those things. let's take a little break from today's conversation if you are enjoying this episode i think you're going to love the brand builders summit you can join me jacob cass matt davies and more than 40 leading brand experts from september 8 to 11 for four days of free talks live q a's workshops and panels you can reserve your free ticket at brandbuilderssummit.com now back to the episode when you think about what ash has just said folks right listeners can you imagine like this what what this means to me is this goes back to what we what we talk about a lot in terms of brand strategy right that the brand is the meaning that other people attach to you right that you don't own the brand as as the company in fact the customers own the brand it's in the eye of the beholder so what ai is enabling is basically that on steroids right it's like that you can't fudge stuff anymore right if the kind if you've got a naff brand a naff product naff offering a naff service it's it's gonna it's gonna be damaged anyway sorry jacob i know you wanted to come in in fact i think we're about half an hour in yeah i'll get one question in i'll get one question it's really interesting that you you say that we can control the data within our brand and it's important to structure that correctly in the best way possible because that's what we can essentially control and the UDC content we can't really.

23:07So what can brands do to control that data better? Because I've seen, for example, on web developers sites, I've been on a few of them recently, and they have these buttons where you can see what the agent can see behind the scenes. So it's like, hey, this is the visual front end. You click this button and now you can see exactly what the agent sees. And it's just like a bunch of code. And he's kind of promoting his knowledge of AI and development, showing that, hey, I can structure data for brands and websites so agents can actually read it correctly. So you're actually sending the right data.

23:44So how important is it to control that sort of data in terms of websites and everything on the back end? And what can we actually do better today to control it? Code is not my bag, right? So in terms, I'm sure that sounds incredibly helpful in terms of, you know, being able to see what the machine would be able to interpret. But in sort of natural language, right, for sort of the general population, what can we do? Well, it's honestly really simple things. It's like having bullet points or tables. And yes, you might, you know, from a sort of visual brand perspective, nobody necessarily wants tables on their website.

24:20But in terms of how you actually structure it, whether you adapt it so that you don't actually visually see a table or whatever, in terms of the actual structuring, if you think even in hiring people, when people are using these ATS systems, these AI systems to read CVs, people have to structure it in a certain way now so that the machine actually can read it and sort of distill their experience from how it's structured. nobody wants a super boring cv when they're sending it through right but you have to adapt it now to what the machine can actually read to make sense of it coherently and pull it out in the right way so from the sort of visual branding perspective there's things you can do to to sort of mask those kind of very formulaic structures that the machines actually need to be able to read it that's a combination of design team and developers and and website you know getting that stuff in the right order from the ugc perspective yeah you know obviously a lot of it you you can't control but i've been speaking to brands and and it's really talking about okay well digital pr what can we do about that in terms of building community and actually doubling down on yeah how we build equity with people through community through the things that live outside of ai that ultimately are going to benefit how the ai reads it right so building i think that's worth unpacking like how to actually build equity for both man and machine like how how how i know one of the things that we talked about earlier matt in the notes was like it do we need a totally brand new playbook do we need to rip up everything i don't think that's the case i think we need to sort of reframe the playbooks that we've had already to make sure that they still work and there are things that we need to double down on as i said it's things like it's still the sort of fundamental you know the things that like sharp and ripson actually did agree on at can this year right it's like there still needs to be this mental availability but it's the mental availability not just for humans but for the machines how visible are you online in terms of actual like mass share of model that's coming in it's things like authenticity and consistency so is what your brand is saying does it match up to the actions the behaviors that the brand is actually enacting.

26:34AI, as you said, Matt, before, AI can like digest swathes of data at lightning speed. It knows when a brand's claims aren't going to stand up to scrutiny and it will penalise for that. So it's really, I've said this on a post before, but it's like, it's really bad news for anyone, pink washing, green washing, rainbow washing, right? That stuff isn't gonna, it just isn't gonna fly anymore, because the machine will penalise it and we'll see when that's happening. so there are you know a lot of the sort of traditional fundamentals still apply but it's just making sure that we're sort of doubling down on those things in a way that the machine can can read and as i said before there is this sort of cycle of building this human equity that then informs the machine equity and that being a sort of virtuous cycle maybe this is where agents actually it's good time to bring in agents because there's the sort of third part of that which is Well, once you've got agents owning some of those like end to end decisions or finalizing transactions or completing these choices, that's where the sort of machine equity ends up getting cemented.

27:42So if you've built this human equity with an individual who's going to your brand directly or who is being vocal about your brand on these public forums, that is feeding into the machine equity where it recommends to other people to go for your brand or your product. Once we start seeing agents actually acting on those decisions, transactions, completing those journeys, then you have that sort of cemented machine equity where it becomes the algorithmic default. Again, obviously, this varies category by category, but it's sort of the framework of how I'm thinking about it. So, Ashley, we've been talking about agents for a little bit.

28:18I think it would be good to define that for our listeners. Like, what is an agent? How is it different to LMs? And what are they doing on the back end? like how do they work as well yeah so an llm is is the is what we know of as chat gpt of claude that's like it's i was about to say basic interface it's obviously not it's obviously not basic but it's the the sort of very kind of commonplace interface that we see now you it's essentially search on steroids you might say like you can use it to do your research to to evaluate it's a lot of those kind of top of funnel upstream parts of the process where agents come in and it's less perhaps about agents that live natively within these AI platforms and more about how a brand's implementing agents as part of their experiences.

29:11Agents are autonomous decision makers and they they they can act and decide within whatever confines and bounds a user gives right so i might say if i set up an agent and say look there's a pair of sneakers that's like limited edition that i really really want but i will only pay x amount for them keep tabs on what's happening in the resale market and when it drops to that price just buy it no matter what that might be a very sort of specific set of confines that i've given it it won't do it until it hits that price and it may never hit that price or i might say within this certain price range or only if they'll ship from germany or whatever it is it can act autonomously but within parameters set by by the user and i think again we're not quite there yet that this is where i think i don't know if if you guys saw the the google io conference in in may this year google are starting to introduce these more agentic experiences into search where you can kind of have these assistants essentially running in the background for all manner of things where you set individual kind of custom agents to take care of certain things that you want.

30:27But it is very different to a user interacting with an LLM and maintaining that control over the process versus an agent, which is essentially AI acting autonomously. Understood. Thank you for defining that. So where are we going from here? The strategic opportunity we kind of dropped at the beginning, we haven't kind of unpacked what that may be. So what is the strategic opportunity here for brands? As we're moving away from this focus on efficiencies, I think so much of these sort of purchase journeys and broader brand building is going to be increasingly mediated. through these entities right this is sort of why i've called it both an existential threat and a golden opportunity because brands that don't respond to this aren't necessarily going to survive it again they might in the next 10 years but like if we're thinking super long term who i mean who knows where we're going to go with this technology and and how what what that's ultimately going to do to culture and behavior in the longer term but it's not you can't only lean on on the human equity forever we need to sort of be still monitoring and baking in how how does that relationship work between the humans the brand and the machines this is what i mean by dynamics right it's it's this push and pull this like sort of fluid relationship of power and and in that dynamic and i think brands that yeah that win out are going to be the ones that respond to these changes that are sort of purposefully building equity with the humans and the machines and keeping tabs on how those things are changing.

32:09Matt Davies:Yeah, one of the things that crossed my mind around this was in terms of when we think of opportunity, right? Like, as you rightly point out, now, if we have AI-enabled consumers that, in effect, can research the claims of a brand, right? and they can kind of like verify to the best of the the ai's ability the claims it it wouldn't surprise me if we saw a rise in what i would call like radical transparency from brands like to differentiate i think there's opportunities to differentiate themselves in markets so for example if i'm in a b2b brand i don't know i'm selling ball bearings or something right and um i know my competitor right is using very dodgy manufacturing techniques and and they're you You know, as you say, maybe they're greenwashing, maybe they're using labour that they shouldn't be using in parts of the world.

33:00Matt Davies:That's pretty unethical. Whatever it might be. Maybe they're sourcing material from, you know, from mines that, you know, have all these issues. I don't know. Whatever it might be. If I then say, right, hang on, our differentiating point is that we're going to back up our claims. Okay, so what we're going to do is make our supply chain open. you know there's been a concept for a while in in in i'm just kind of going off on a tangent here but like this concept of open book which is like where like we're going to share what everything costs where everything comes from you know like coffee sourcing for example fair trade all that good stuff like i think we might see more of a rise of that side of things so that now when an ai is scanning my sect my industry they can see quite clearly that what i say is true and right and that I've been open about it versus my competitor who I know would find it very hard to open up their books, if you like, to use that ancient expression on their supply chain.

33:57Matt Davies:So there might be things like that, which we start to see as an opportunity for brands to stop fudging it, right? To start standing by these claims that they're making and really opening themselves up to scrutiny. That's what I hope because I think the world will be better for that totally and i and i think that's that's a that's a really important point like this shift as you i think it's basically going to make brands like pull their socks up right you're going to have to be more radically transparent more radically authentic i mean i think there's there's the machine part of it what you've just been mentioning matt like it's going to know when there's inconsistency and it's going to penalize that but from the human point of view like if we think about the world around us today it's because of ai largely it's like a super flat samey world it's really fragmented there's there's a lot of yeah just just flatness and i think people i think you know i do a lot of cultural research as well people are gasping for meaning i think we see a lot of narratives in in in this in our industry at the moment of like weird is good right it's like the antidote to ai slot this algorithmic flatness that we're sort of seeing around us these media echo chambers where there's sort of nothing has that much meaning anymore and as consumers we're sort of starved of that so we've got this sort of on the one hand weird is good reintroducing intentional friction into brand experiences spiky edges to to to really have some distinctiveness, some like level of like friction and meaning in the experience, helping brands kind of cut through the noise.

35:35I think that's a really, really important part of it. But I guess this sort of brings me to a slightly bigger philosophical point that I've been thinking about recently quite a lot, which is, you know, the way that we understand ourselves as consumers, as people, as consumers, when we think about who are we, who do we want to be, What do we align ourselves with? What are our values? We're outsourcing a lot of that kind of thinking or increasingly so to AI. So when we're talking about the sort of moral reasoning, am I being ghosted? OK, maybe that's a funny example. But actually, how do I navigate this tricky conversation with with someone?

36:14What career path should I take? a lot of the thinking, not just in the work and how we use Excel, a lot of the sort of personal introspective thinking that we're doing is being outsourced to these machines. And maybe this is slightly tangential, but I think it's really interesting from a sort of consumer identity brand point of view, where our sense of self as individuals is, I think, neuroscientists, psychologists, you know, philosophers agree on this, is that the sense of self is derived from the stories we tell ourselves right these narratives that we build it's the same for brands but for us as people it's built from this very active process of reflection introspection participation in that when that's getting outsourced what does that mean for how we understand ourselves what we align to what we our sense of what we value and what does that mean then for the relationships with brands so it's it's quite I guess it's a bit of a sort of murky amorphous point at the moment and it's when maybe not yet yet there at a sort of critical juncture of it but as I sort of see us outsourcing more of that and us sort of losing the ability to to perhaps introspect and and build that sense of self I think it's going to raise some pretty big questions for brands and how they understand the consumer and how the consumer understands themselves and the brands that mean something to them.