The End of the Brief as We Know It
The brief was built for a different production model
Before the main story, a few headlines worth your attention.
In less than a week, AI Trailblazers will host AI-Verse at POSSIBLE, one of the conference’s main stages dedicated entirely to AI at North America’s largest marketing conference. Built around the theme Show, Don’t Tell, the stage will feature a stellar lineup of CEOs, CMOs, and founders bringing thought leadership and demo experiences from the frontier of AI transformation, with a sharp focus on what is working, what is changing fast, and what leaders need to understand now. View the agenda.
Stanford HAI’s 2026 AI Index says AI is becoming a core business system with U.S. private AI investment reaching $285.9 billion in 2025 while adoption, capabilities, and revenue scale accelerate. Its sharper warning is that governance, transparency, and environmental readiness are lagging behind the pace of deployment, making AI a board-level risk issue as much as a growth opportunity. View the report.
Claude Design turns prompts into prototypes, slides, and marketing assets, pushing design work upstream from specialist tools into an AI workspace for product and marketing teams. That puts pressure on Figma and Adobe because the threat is no longer better editing features, but losing the first draft, workflow, and user relationship to Anthropic. More here.
The controversial Medvi story is more specific than “AI made a unicorn.” It shows a tele-health company using AI to automate growth and operations so aggressively that it reportedly hit $401 million in 2025 revenue with extremely lean staffing and a 2026 sales projection near $1.8 billion. AI can now compress company-building speed, but Medvi also shows how that model can trigger serious compliance and reputational risk when marketing outpaces oversight. NYT has the story.
Spoke on the CMO Confidential Podcast about the realities of marketing. 5x CMO Mike Linton and I covered how leading both humans and AI agents is reshaping leadership, and why marketers will need to make fewer, but harder, bets. We also discussed why losing is not fatal but forgetting is, the risk of assuming human beings are inherently special, and the idea of “invisible failure.” Tune in here.
The Brief Was a Bridge
For decades, the brief was the anchor document of marketing. Strategic, creative, media, digital, sponsorship — every variant had its own template, its own ritual. I once ran a months-long project just to redesign a brief format at a Fortune 100 company. That was not unusual. The brief was treated as the thinking itself.
At its most formidable, it was how marketers translated strategy for creative teams and agencies, and few models captured that discipline better than BBDO’s Get/Who/To/By framework. Developed in New York in the mid-2000s, it was deliberately constrained to a single page and four boxes: Get, the audience; Who, what they currently think, feel, and do; To, the behavioral shift you want; and By, the message that will drive it. Its power was not just the simplicity. It was the insistence on behavior change over vague awareness goals.
Which is exactly why what comes next is worth saying plainly: it is time to retire the brief as the central artifact of marketing. Not because it lacked rigor. Because the production model it was built for no longer exists.
The brief belonged to a world where thinking and making were separate acts. You diagnosed, documented, handed off, and trusted someone else to interpret your intent and build from there. The brief was the bridge between strategy and execution. That bridge is collapsing. AI has compressed the distance between idea and output to near zero, and the brief — static, interpretive, handoff-dependent — is now a piece of infrastructure built for a gap that no longer exists.
The prototype as the new marketing language
I saw this articulated clearly at a recent AI Trailblazers Summit, where I interviewed the Chief Consumer Products Officer at Visa. When I asked what had changed most, his answer stayed with me. Business leads are no longer showing up with functional specification documents. They are showing up with working prototypes and fully formed user interfaces. Engineers are no longer interpreting intent. They are refining something tangible that’s already been developed.
The same pattern is starting to surface in cross-functional product work. Datadog’s product team, testing the very new Claude Design in beta, reported going from rough idea to working prototype before anyone left the room, with output that stayed true to the company’s brand and design guidelines. That is not a software engineering story anymore. It is a team behaving the way marketing teams will need to behave.
We can now rough out the TV spot we want shot, mock up the site we want built, visualize the sponsorship activation we want executed, draft the customer experience we want delivered. Instead of describing the work in abstraction, we can show the work in partial form. The conversation stops being about interpreting the brief and becomes about improving something that already exists.
This does not eliminate strategy. It changes how strategy shows up. The future is not a better brief. It is a different artifact entirely — a living representation of the work itself. Not a document that gets updated, but a prototype that evolves. When an insight shifts or a competitor moves, you do not restart the briefing process. You update the inputs, prompt again, and regenerate. The feedback loop tightens. The cycle time collapses. The approvals get easier.
The tools are hardwiring this shift, and the specifics are worth noticing. Claude Design ingests a company’s codebase and existing design files during onboarding, then applies the brand’s colors, typography, and components automatically to every prototype, deck, or one-pager generated after that — with teams able to maintain more than one system in parallel. That detail matters because the reflexive CMO objection to prototyping has always been “yes, but it won’t look like us.”
Adobe’s newly announced Firefly AI Assistant goes further into the production chain: it orchestrates multi-step workflows across Photoshop, Premiere, and the rest of Creative Cloud from a single prompt, then packages work for review in Frame.io, collects stakeholder feedback there, and applies the requested changes automatically. The point is not the feature list. The point is that it isn’t just creation that now sits a prompt away. The coordination layer — the review cycles, the revision rounds, the handoffs between specialists — collapses too.
What marketing has to leave behind
If the work itself can now be expressed, iterated, and partially produced through prompting, the interesting questions move downstream. Three are worth sitting with.
What is the agency for, exactly? Early Claude Design users offer a concrete answer to what gets squeezed: teams at Brilliant turned static mockups into interactive prototypes they could share and user-test without code review or pull requests, then handed the design intent directly to Claude Code for implementation. That middle zone, the interpretive layer that turns ideas into artifacts, is where agencies have lived for thirty years. Its value does not disappear, but it shifts. Upstream, toward the insight that sets the prototype in motion. Downstream, toward the craft and production quality prompting alone cannot deliver. The middle, where most agency hours have historically been billed, is where the squeeze will be felt first.
What gets redefined inside marketing? The job shifts from writing about the work to building the work. That rewards a different skill set: taste, pattern recognition, AI enabled prototyping/producing capabilities and the ability to judge a rough cut against a brand’s standard at speed. It disadvantages the marketer whose primary value-add was process ownership or controlling the brief.
Where does human judgment still matter most? Almost certainly in the same places it always did: strategic framing, brand coherence, cultural read, and the decision about whether the work is actually good. But it now has to show up earlier, on partial artifacts, in much shorter cycles. Judgment without velocity becomes a bottleneck. Velocity without judgment produces fluent nonsense.
Frameworks like Get/Who/To/By were attempts to strip away excess and force clarity. The move to prototyping is not a rejection of that thinking. It is its logical extension. If the goal was always to sharpen intent and improve the work, the endpoint is not endless refinement of the brief. It is the ability to express strategy directly, in the form of the thing you want made.
Marketers who adapt quickly will treat prototypes, rough cuts, and working models as their native language. Those who do not will keep perfecting briefs, with increasing skill, for an audience that has already stopped reading them and for a business that may increasingly be getting left behind.
Where I’ve been
The Human Attention Summit brought together an especially eclectic mix of leaders across tech, media, finance, entertainment, creativity, and culture, including Esther Perel, Matthew Prince, Pablo Torre, Reed Rayman, Takeshi Numoto, Carolyn Everson and Arthur Sadoun, among others, to explore a question that feels increasingly urgent: what does it mean to be human in the AI era? Congratulations to Joe Marchese and the team at Human Ventures for organizing such an important and much-needed conversation.
Framed around the idea that attention is now the world’s most valuable asset, the event paired wide-ranging conversations on relationships, storytelling, commerce, and markets with a carefully curated room designed for real exchange. What made it stand out was not just the caliber of the speakers, but the diversity of perspectives among the attendees too and the sense that this is exactly the moment to have a more serious conversation about humanity, attention, and value as AI reshapes how we live and work.
What I’m reading
Human scientists trounce the best AI agents (Nature.com)
The 2026 AI Index Report (WSJ)
Verizon CEO: AI Is Coming for Your Job, and Everyone Knows It (Inc.)
What I’ve written lately
A Public Company Goes All In on AI (April 2025)
AI Is Rewriting Who Decides (March 2025)
Fighting Cognitive Surrender (March 2025)
Who Remembers Wins (February 2025)
2026 AI Predictions: Identity & Agents (February 2025)
Shiv Singh is the CEO of Savvy Matters, which helps business teams translate AI disruption into practical business and marketing strategies, organizational design, executive-ready roadmaps, and bespoke education programs. He is also the Co-Founder of AI Trailblazers, a vibrant community uniting marketers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists at the forefront of AI.
A former two-time Chief Marketing & Customer Experience Officer and author of Marketing with AI for Dummies (4th print run, translated into five languages), Shiv built his career at LendingTree, Visa, PepsiCo, and The Expedia Group, and serves as a public-company board member of a Fortune 300 company and private investor.
Thoughtful takeaways, and on the surface, it makes a ton of sense. I think one could also make the case that going from zero to build in under six seconds means a brief is more necessary, not less. It's the one time in the process that we'll be able to "slow think". Prototyping requires a faster kind of thinking becuase you are thinking, designing, and building all at once. And this is coming from someone who has, for over a decade, preached the gospel of iterative design, "responsive marketing," "fuzzy disciplines," and people with blurred talents and overlapping skills doing more than they ever have.
AI blows all of these past dynamics out of the water. Briefs are vulnerable to being snapshots in time. But the greatest strength may be that they force us to slow down in a world where timelines for going from think to execute are more compressed than they've ever been.
I think we would both agree that the brief is not going to be the single source of truth, as it once was. I do think it can greatly influence the build/production process and provide some grounding if/when things inevitably go off the rails (because they always go off the rails)
Agree with you on the need for agencies and marketers to do a complete rethink on where value is created and how.
What I would add is that the brief (and the skills involved in creating powerful briefs) shifts from being a brief to kick off the "process" to becoming the prompt and the input into generating the prototype. Those who used to create briefs and assess "the work" are (or should be) well suited to lead this transition because, like a brief, a prompt provides the context, and then the savvy eyes to assess if the prototype is right or needs further adjustment.