Founders are the most creative people on the planet. As well as having business nous, they’re also entrepreneurs and artists with imagination and passion, able to turn their dream into a commercially viable product or service.
When we think of founders we tend to think of visionaries like Steve Jobs, James Dyson, Richard Branson, Dietrich Mateschitz, Phil Knight, Anita Roddick or countless others who changed how either businesses or consumers work, buy, or interact with the world around them. These people succeeded because they were creative, both in terms of their product-design, but also in terms of how they shaped their business model and their marketing.
Products were original. And the marketing was memorable.
In many of these cases, the brands were personified by their founders, who were visionaries with out-of-the-box thinking that seemed to deliver all the answers.At Apple’s keynote events, for example, attendees would famously hang on Steve Jobs’ every word as he delivered talks that were more like plays, with a three-act structure and product reveals that made the audience gasp and applaud in a frenzy. There are dozens of books available that capture his quotes and insights.
Richard Branson is also just as well-known as his brands, with over eighteen million followers on his LinkedIn page, which is where he posts his commentary and reflections on entrepreneurship and the world today.
The rise of ai-generated content by startups and founders
Today, many up-and-coming founders are emulating their heroes, sharing their advice and opinions online, using themselves as a way of marketing their companies in the hope of gaining wider success. But the way that these founders are writing their content has changed.
A study by Originality.ai found that 50% of LinkedIn posts were likely AI in 2025. Orbit Media’s comprehensive Blogger Survey reported that 66% of those who wrote articles used AI to generate ideas and one-in-ten used AI to completely write their articles. Hubspot found that startups used AI for writing marketing and sales copy, as well as for brainstorming new ideas and angles. Meanwhile, Strategy.com found that 56% of business leaders wanted to use ai to improve their decision-making.
So, are founders outsourcing their creativity to AI? Well, the data suggests that they may be. And deliberately so.
Why are founders turning to AI?
We, like many others, are very excited about the potential of what AI can achieve and we therefore completely understand that it’s very easy to get swept up in the euphoric wave of this transformational technology. Especially because of its lucrative promise to save time on writing and brainstorming tasks.
Founders are, of course, busy people, trying to get their product development right while running a business at the same time. If that wasn’t bad enough, they also need to find funding and have to work hard to attract investors (along with everything else that’s going on). It can mean ridiculous hours and a level of commitment that not everyone’s cut out for.
There’s also enormous pressure at the moment with Forbes, Entrepreneur, Elite Business magazine and Startups magazine, all writing that founders absolutely need to create their own content and build a personal brand if they want any possible chance of building trust and winning investment. Reddit forums are likewise dominated with articles saying how founder-led marketing beats everything else.
It’s therefore not too hard to imagine why founders are turning to AI. AI can quickly turn rough notes into something structured and coherent, offering a quick way of putting together all sorts of marketing paraphernalia. Blog articles, landing pages, LinkedIn posts, emails, quotes for the press, product titles… you name it, AI can write it.
And we actually agree: when founders share their insights and tell their story, it’s one of the most effective ways of marketing to help a business drive sales and growth.
But we don’t agree that founders should unquestionably turn their writing over to AI. Because when you use AI for your daily thinking, you also stop practicing the creative skills you need for having a big-picture strategy.
AI can produce competence, but not creative originality
In many instances, AI is killing creativity. No matter what you ask a generative AI tool it will give you a workable solution, but this won’t be unique. It will be a hodgepodge of received wisdom, a close-to-literal average that will no doubt be workable, but it won’t break any new ground because AI works by analysing and rehashing what already exists.
For example, the name of Richard Branson’s ‘Virgin’ was suggested when a member of his team pointed out that they were all “complete virgins at business”. The logo was also created on the spur of the moment, as Branson and a young creative designer bounced around ideas on his houseboat, and while talking about the logo, the designer just scribbled an idea down on a napkin.
If you ask ChatGPT to suggest some names for a new record company, it might come back with “Honest sound”, “Human noise” and “Velvet frequency” (at least, those were the results when we tried), which work, but don’t have anywhere near the same punch as something that just… sounds right after being suggested in the spur of the moment. Without lived experience and emotional connection, how can AI ever come up with the perfect brand name?
The same goes for straplines. Red Bull’s famous line, “It gives you wings”, was born out of exhaustion, frustration and a flash of inspiration at 3am, when the slogan finally came to Johannes Kastner, the creative leading the agency Dietrich Mateschitz had hired for developing a winning slogan.
If you ask Gemini to suggest some slogans for a new energy drink, you won’t have to stay awake until 3am, but the suggestions that come back will be as creative as “power through your day”, “charge your mind” or “real energy for real life” (again, those were the results for us). They work with bland efficiency, but would they help to sell 75 billion cans and launch a global marketing powerhouse?
Demis Hassabis, Co-Founder & CEO of Google DeepMind, recently explained why AI has creative limits when he spoke at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, saying that:
“What separates great scientists from good scientists is their creativity and their taste for [knowing] what’s the right question? What’s the right hypothesis? It’s much harder to come up with the right question and right hypothesis than it is to solve a conjecture. I would call that the highest level of creativity and so far, today’s [AI] systems don’t have that capability.”
One of the great points that Hassabis went on to make was that if you trained AI with all human knowledge up until 1911, it wouldn’t have been able to come up with Einstein’s theory of relativity, which came in 1915. AI can give you answers, but if you don’t know the right questions to explore, you’ll never be able to innovate and create something new.
Perhaps this should be a warning to founders, because the most memorable brands, products, slogans and advertising campaigns weren’t built by averaging what already existed.
AI is making things too easy
Professor Jacqueline Ng Lane explored AI’s impact on originality in her talk on how AI is rewiring human creativity and decision-making. In the video, she says that AI was able to generate “solutions” that were of value, but humans were able to come up with more “innovative solutions”.
Lane found that when AI provided detailed explanations alongside its recommendations, people stopped exercising their independent thought and were “no longer using their cognitive judgement” as they simply deferred to the AI instead of thinking critically. She argued that how we use AI matters and that it shouldn’t replace our thinking, that it should instead be used to help us to surface blind spots and scale our expertise. It can be used for the iteration of ideas, but a human must always be part of that loop, otherwise we become passive, deferring to AI even when we shouldn’t and gradually losing the very expertise and critical thinking that makes our ideas worth refining in the first place.
Working together with humans produces better results
Founders don’t have to do everything alone. Most of the most successful ones in history certainly didn’t! Jobs had Wozniak. Branson built teams of people who could execute his vision. The idea of the lone founder-genius is largely a myth; behind every bold brand is usually a group of people who built upon the original spark.
Founders always have options. They can bounce ideas around with their own trusted team or they can outsource the work to specialists who can bring their own experience and skills to bear.
Leaders looking for a good founder branding agency to help them build their brand and craft their messages, should be ready to have their ideas challenged by someone with the experience to know the right questions to ask. This isn’t the same as outsourcing your thoughts, because the right agency will push you to think deeper. That is what a great agency brings: they’re creative partners who help a founder find their voice and put it to work.
This doesn’t mean that founders shouldn’t use AI entirely for writing. As Professor Lane points out, it can be a powerful tool for learning and developing expertise quickly, as well as improving and building on ideas once you have them.
If anything, the proliferation of AI slop should be seen as an opportunity for innovative founders. Because the more AI-generated content floods the internet, the more valuable genuine human creativity becomes.
By Kirsty Jarvis
Kirsty, our CEO and founder, has spent the past two decades in PR and marketing roles, resulting in a wealth of experience leveraging the power of media and creating impactful campaigns for hundreds of startups and well-known brands.
