The Biggest Ai Risk For Brands Isn’t Terrible Design. It’s Cookie-Cutter Monotony.

I once witnessed a company pop a mini-site into AI and nearly hit the publish button with the output. They imported their copy and hit generate. That’s it. No brand identity, no design team or leadership reviews, just every glaring, telltale sign of a typical AI-generated website, ready to *shudder* go live. I’ve only seen it happen once, but I’m sure, more than anything, it’s happening at plenty of other companies right now as their teams get access to AI models.

As a design leader, I nearly had a metaphorical heart attack. I couldn’t believe it almost got published, and what’s more, that it lacked any creative soul or brand applications. Looking at the mini-site, it was technically proficient. And that was the problem. The sections were cleanly coded, and the content was spread out effectively with proper whitespace and typography hierarchy. At first glance, it looked perfectly fine, but on second glance, it looked exactly like what it was. An out-of-the-box AI product that could have belonged to anyone. Without any human oversight or governance.

A technically perfect AI-generated website can still look like it belongs to anyone, and that’s the brand risk nobody’s design review is catching. #DesignLeadership #AIDesign

AI Tells Are Fading

Earlier, I wrote about visible humanity, explaining how designers are cutting through the AI noise with more personality and human-led design elements, such as grain textures, hand-drawn elements, and unique, deliberate choices. As AI advances at lightning speed, it’s learning how to incorporate these visual cues into its output if it’s prompted correctly. Dead giveaways are also fading just as fast, and if your review process depends on catching them, your job just got a little more difficult.

Here’s the good news, though. The one AI tell that keeps coming up, both in research and in the field, is predictability. AI is only capable of generating something based on what already exists in the world. In simple terms, AI is trained to provide outputs based on what it’s fed: think of design trends, portfolio sites like Behance or Dribbble, etc. Outputs (like websites, social images, etc.) generally look similar because the AI model predicts the most likely design based on everything it was trained on, rather than designing for your brand specifically.

Two AI red flags to watch out for (noting that just because they’re flags doesn’t necessarily mean it’s AI-generated):

• Too Trendy: The design follows trends but lacks any brand identity. It’s more like an amalgam of what’s popular right now, mushed into one layout. The New Yorker recently documented a similar pattern: beige backgrounds, italic serifs, and spaced-out subheads appearing across company after company.
• Overly Clean: The design feels clean and premium, but nothing backs it up. Meaning, the look of the finished design may not align with the brand’s actual standards. A premium feel alone won’t make your design more memorable: a NielsenIQ neuroscience study found that even high-quality AI ads triggered weaker memory activation than traditional ones.

AI’s dead giveaways are fading fast, but one tell keeps showing up in the research: predictable design that follows every trend and belongs to no brand. #AIDesign #BrandIdentity

The Identity Test

If you’re concerned about the sanctity of your brand, design, or asset, you can put it to the test with one simple identity check. Remove the logo, product name, and blur the copy. Does the design feel utterly like you, or does it just feel like the same visual noise that’s cluttering your social feeds? Is your brand represented as a formidable identity?

Think about some of the top companies out there right now that can easily pass this test:

1. Coca-Cola: Their red & white color scheme and one-of-a-kind bottle are recognizable to almost anyone, even with the logo, product name, and copy stripped away. Why? In 1915, Coca-Cola’s bottlers gave glassmakers a challenge to design a “bottle so distinct that you would recognize it by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.” In 1977, the contour bottle was so distinctive that it earned its own trademark. The bottle, quite frankly, shaped the brand’s entire identity.
2. LEGO: You would recognize a LEGO minifigure instantly, without any logo, copy, or brand element added. The cylinder head, blocky body, and curved C-shaped hands were design choices, not manufacturing necessities. While LEGO couldn’t trademark its basic brick, a European court ruled in 2015 that no competitor could copy the minifigure due to its unique design. It’s literal legal proof that design matters!
3. Google: The magic of Google’s brand lies in 4 simple colors: blue, red, yellow, and green. More than likely, if you see that scheme somewhere in the world, you’ll think of Google. And here’s why. When Google rebranded its identity in 2015, its designers pared the brand down to its core foundations: “four colors on a clean white background.” They even created a hyper-minimalist version of their logo that’s nothing but four colored dots.

AI can follow every trend in your favorite social feeds, design portfolios, or curation libraries, but it can’t give you a bottle you’d recognize in the dark, a figure unlike any other in the entire world, or four colors that people instantly think of as yours.

Coca-Cola, LEGO, and Google pass the identity test without a logo in sight, and if your AI-assisted design can’t, it’s not ready to ship. #BrandIdentity #AIDesign

My Real-Life Example of Passing The Identity Test

I was the lead designer of the new Zoom careers site. I was responsible for designing all 42 pages of the website, which launched in September 2026. This project meant the world to me because I love Zoom and its products, and it was truly collaborative. GBS Worldwide built the brand system with Zoom and wrote the “Imagine what you can…” headlines, showcasing Zoomie Avatars as a brand element. Members of the Zoom team met with GBS and me throughout to keep us true to their vision. The RBM dev team brought it all to life, including a piece I’m especially proud of: the interactive globe of Zoom’s offices on the homepage, built by Jeremy Hogan, our dev lead, partner, and COO at Red Branch Media. Region pages, career paths, belonging pages: every one of those 42 pages had to feel like Zoom without looking like anyone else.

The Emoji Test

Here’s an uncomfortable truth for anyone reading this article, hoping for an “AI-tells checklist.” Emojis, one of the most common AI tells, are all over Zoom’s site. On a generic landing page, an emoji in a rounded square is filler. On Zoom’s site, I intentionally chose emojis. On the Zoom platform, users can react to each other with emojis in calls every day, so I rethought what an icon could be and turned emojis into icon elements that serve as a visual company culture identifier. GBS pushed the idea further by proposing that we add emoji animations to people’s backgrounds, mirroring how emojis animate in a Zoom call when people make specific gestures. Emojis may be used by AI right now, but I used them with a completely different intent and identity. And that intent is something AI can’t replicate.

Zero AI, All Human

Intentionally, AI played zero part in the ideas I brought to the table, or in the designs of any of the 42 pages I drafted in Figma. I’m not saying that as a humble brag. I’m saying this because when you remove the Zoom logo from this careers site, you still know whose it is. The Zoomie Avatars, the emoji reactions, the “squarecle” shape accents (a term coined by my collaborators), and the vivid colors all trace back to how Zoom works and the represented core of Zoom’s company culture. None of this site or brand identity came from a trend board. It came from multiple points of view, from multiple people, across multiple companies, creating a truly unique, beautiful website together.

AI may lean on emojis right now, but on Zoom’s careers site, every emoji is a callback to the reactions people send in calls every day: same element, different intent. #DesignLeadership #EmployerBrand

The intent of this article isn’t to be “anti-AI.” Our team uses AI every day. This article simply presents my experiences showing that AI can’t be the end-all, be-all for design decisions. That mini-site was technically proficient but lacked identity. Projects that ship without an identity check pose the biggest risk of turning your brand into the same cookie-cutter content flooding social feeds right now. Instead, think of AI as a collaborator.

AI can generate content astonishingly fast and present decent designs, but it doesn’t have your skills, intuition, and judgment to make something unforgettable. Now, go out there and make something incredible.