At the Worth & OPR Brand Stewardship Breakfast in Davos—hosted with Loreal Lynch (Jasper) and Chris Foster (Omnicom Public Relations)—the table wasn’t doing “AI hype.” It was doing operations: what’s working, what’s breaking, and where the friction actually lives when you try to move from pilot projects to enterprise behavior.
The opening framing captured the mood shift from a year ago. As one host put it, “Last year, I kind of felt like it was Groundhog Day around this AI brand. Trust…” The implication wasn’t fatigue—it was that the conversation had matured. The question is no longer whether AI belongs in marketing and communications; it’s how you keep control of the work when the tooling moves faster than the org can absorb it.
A lot of the talk landed on governance—not in the abstract, but as an everyday constraint. One participant cut straight to the point: “Getting around procurement and the AI governance councils within your organization. It’s brutal.” That one line explains why so many “transformations” stall. It’s not that teams can’t generate use cases. It’s that they can’t get adoption, access, and permission at the speed the market now expects.
And speed—specifically the impatience for results—came up as a self-inflicted wound. One participant described the pattern: “I think there’s this Need for Speed, and so people don’t want to spend the time.” The “time” here isn’t implementation hours. It’s the foundational work: consolidating messaging, defining voice, building governance, and creating a usable knowledge base so AI systems don’t just produce more content—they produce the right content.
That connects to a second thread: authenticity at scale. One person described the target state as less “write a piece” and more “build a system that can write in our voice without drifting.” Another participant put the failure mode bluntly: “How do you have the guard rails … stay authentic as you scale so that it’s not slop, you know.” The word “slop” is doing a lot of work there. Everyone knows what it looks like: content that’s plausible, high-volume, and brand-toxic because it feels generic or miscalibrated.
What’s interesting is that nobody framed this as a creative-versus-machine argument. It was closer to craft-versus-chaos. When the inputs are messy—fragmented messaging, conflicting guidance, outdated language—AI will faithfully scale the mess. When the inputs are coherent, AI can become leveraged. There was real agreement that the blocking issue is “context,” not capability.
Another point that landed: the mental model has shifted from fear of replacement to pressure for re-architecture. One participant described their own evolution: “There’s no way AI would not replace 20 to 25 of the jobs.” But that line didn’t hang in the room as doom. It landed as a reminder that the work is being re-bundled: fewer purely mechanical tasks, more oversight, more orchestration, more responsibility for outcomes.
The New Rules of Discoverability
The table also revealed a genuine tension around the open web and “being found.” Someone recalled a moment from last year’s breakfast that sounded outlandish then and feels less outlandish now: “I wonder if I should stop investing and building my website and I should instead hire someone that can focus on getting us found in LLMs…” The immediate response—still in the transcript—was: “You’re crazy.” But the fact that this came up again (and wasn’t dismissed as quickly) is the tell. The discoverability game is changing. CMOs and CCOs are being asked to fund new forms of visibility while still maintaining the legacy ones that boards, business units, and stakeholders understand.
If there was a throughline to the morning, it was this: AI isn’t “a tool” in the way the last decade’s tools were. It behaves more like infrastructure—something that touches workflow design, governance, reputation, and measurement simultaneously. That’s why the discussion kept returning to systems questions: standardize or let “a thousand flowers bloom,” centralize or federate, lock things down or move fast and audit later.And it’s why the most practical takeaway wasn’t a platform recommendation—it was an operating principle: if you want scale without brand drift, you have to do the unglamorous work first. Build the message foundation. Agree on guardrails. Make it possible for teams to move quickly and stay in bounds. Otherwise, you get speed, but not control—and you’ll spend the year cleaning up things you didn’t mean to say.
