Let’s stop pretending this AI rush is brave. It isn’t. It’s terrified.
Across marketing holding companies, executives are racing to adopt AI not because they understand it, but because they’re scared of being the last one without a slide. “We can’t afford not to,” they say; executive code for “I don’t want to be blamed.” This isn’t strategy. It’s signaling under pressure. And it’s going to be catastrophically expensive.
Big organizations don’t move toward truth. They move toward safety. AI has become the safest possible move: highly visible, socially approved, and impossible to argue against without sounding obsolete. No one gets fired for greenlighting an AI initiative. Plenty fear being punished for hesitation. So the result is inevitable: loud announcements, proprietary assistants, internal agents, global platforms with names that sound important and do very little.
This is not adoption. Its performance.
Loss aversion explains almost everything. The perceived downside of not doing AI feels immediate and existential: angry boards, nervous investors, headlines asking if you’re “behind.” The downside of doing it badly is delayed, distributed, and someone else’s problem. So holding companies overreact. They centralize. They standardize. They automate. They turn a flexible tool into a rigid system and call it transformation.
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And in doing so, they reveal a deeper misunderstanding.
Holding companies are built to reduce variance. That’s their superpower. They exist to make large, messy systems predictable and governable. Creativity depends on the opposite. It thrives on disagreement, taste, context, and the occasional irrational bet. When you inject AI into a variance-killing machine, you don’t get better ideas. You get faster sameness. Smooth work. Confident work. Work that offends no one and excites no one.
AI is brilliant at averages. Culture is moved by outliers.
Here’s the part no one wants to admit: AI doesn’t belong to the holding companies. It isn’t scarce. A five-person agency has access to the same models, the same tools, the same raw power as a global network; without the layers of approval, politics, and brand-safe paralysis. Scale used to be the moat. Now it’s a tax.
And the timing couldn’t be worse for the incumbents.
Every “AI efficiency” quietly pushes experienced people out of holding companies. Strategists tired of decks. Creatives exhausted by risk committees. Operators fed up with spending more time managing internal optics than making things. Some are laid off in the name of progress. Others leave because they can feel the work thinning.
These aren’t juniors playing startup. They’re veterans with taste, scar tissue, and a point of view.
For the first time in decades, three things are aligning: powerful tools, disillusioned talent, and collapsing barriers to entry. That’s not a trend. That’s an opening!
The agencies that emerge now won’t be small because they’re underpowered. They’ll be small because they choose to be. They’ll use AI shamelessly but quietly, as infrastructure, not identity. They won’t brand it. They won’t centralize it. They’ll keep humans in the loop, not out of nostalgia, but because humans introduce judgment, friction, and productive irrationality.
Their advantage won’t be efficiency. It will be asymmetry. Limited downside. Massive upside.
Meanwhile, holding companies are betting their future on centralized AI systems that assume stability in a world becoming more volatile by the month. One platform. One workflow. One approved version of “good.” That’s how monocultures form. And monocultures collapse the moment conditions change.
The irony is painful. In trying to look future-ready, holding companies are making themselves more fragile. AI becomes a story told to investors, not a tool that improves thinking. A badge of modernity, not a source of advantage. They’re optimizing for the next earnings call while quietly eroding the conditions that once made them relevant.
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Soon, an agency will appear that makes all of this look absurd in hindsight. It will say something unfashionable: that creativity loses value the moment it becomes too easy to produce. That friction isn’t waste. That humans aren’t the weak link, but the point. It might even dare to position itself against synthetic sameness, something like “99.9% unartificial creativity” said without irony.
The big players will laugh. Then they’ll worry. Then they’ll try to copy it. And finally, when it starts winning, they’ll try to buy it.. only to discover that independence, taste, and courage don’t survive integration.
We’ve seen this cycle before. What’s different now is the speed and the scale of self-deception.
In ten years, everyone will pretend this was obvious. We’ll praise small teams, human judgment, and creative risk as if we never tried to automate them into submission. And in fifty years, it will seem insane that anyone believed bloated global conglomerates were the best possible custodians of imagination.
The beige singularity is coming. And it won’t be beaten by bigger systems; only by smaller, sharper, more reckless ones.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Adel Borky, Marketing Consultant | Behavioral Science Aficionado
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