Writing on brand strategy in the AI age: how brands become machine-readable, applicable, and accountable.
For agents, every article is also available as Markdown: at its address with “.md” appended, with title, summary and dates in the file’s header.
October 2026
When all that is left at the front is a field, the answer is the brand experience. Structured content is not enough. The brand has to commit to which of its statements applies.
September 2026 · also published in German at tbobm.com
An MCP server makes a brand queryable and solves consistency. Whether a statement may be made in its name, it does not decide. That stays with brand management.
September 2026 · with Tabea Otto · first published at HORIZONT
Visibility in AI search is only the first stage. Why checking how machines read the brand today moves to the start of the branding process.
August 2026
AI makes the everyday surface of every brand cheap, and value shifts to what is deliberately withheld. Why the price premium sits on the decision, not on the machine’s inability, and what a brand’s two lists look like.
August 2026 · first published at tbobm.com
Why the unsaid works on people and disappears for machines. A response to Erich Posselt’s “The Smoothness of Clarity”.
July 2026
Switzerland prepared its writing rules for language models and its corporate design as a PDF. Why the brand specification belongs in a public, versioned repository.
July 2026
This page reads itself: on the left the page for humans, on the right the same page as AI search and browser agents process it. Read live from the source, not mocked up.
July 2026
Machine Readable Brands: brands whose identity, language, and design logic exist as a specification that people and systems can work with. Definition, three stages, boundaries.
July 2026
When clients can generate any analysis in minutes, authority through knowing more collapses. What strategy work sells instead: the recommendation that commits. The bet.
July 2026
Agent Authority: brands grant their AI agents a mandate, mostly without ever deciding to. What an agent may promise, and who stands behind it.
July 2026
AI is taking over execution, and the industry consoles itself with taste. But trainable taste is consensus taste. What remains is the party that stands behind the decisions.
March 2026
Agentic Brand Readiness is the ability of a brand to be correctly recognized, described, and recommended by AI systems and agents. This requires brand attributes to be defined explicitly, in structured and machine-readable form.
March 2026 · continuously updated
AI agents are telling your brand story, whether you want them to or not. Brand Infrastructure is the answer: designing brand for humans and for systems at once.
Every essay starts with an observation of my own, usually from the work. Then I use AI as a sparring partner:
→ First the machine attacks the thesis: Is it true? Is it new, or old wine in new bottles? I develop what survives the pushback.
→ Parallel research agents gather evidence. What does not hold gets cut. Numbers that measure something link their source, and the checked ones carry their limits in the evidence.
→ The writing happens in dialogue, over many rounds: I shorten, simplify, and discard terms until the text sounds spoken.
→ At the end, the machine checks the text against my own writing rules, and I decide what stays.
Every thesis, every sharp edge, and every mistake is my decision. The machine delivers the analysis. The commitment is mine.