Your Favorite Brands Might Be Talking To You In AI And You’d Never Know

Once, the voice of a brand was a tightly controlled expression, created by human copywriters, filtered through layers of approval. Today, that voice might be coming from a machine or a model, one trained not just to mimic tone but to understand it, adapt it, and amplify it across channels at scale.

Marketers are increasingly comfortable letting generative AI write blog posts, ad copy, product descriptions, and even social media banter. It’s not just efficiency; it’s a shift in trust.

Take Unilever, for instance. The global consumer goods company now uses AI to generate localized content across dozens of markets, ensuring consistency in brand messaging while personalizing tone and language to local audiences. AI helps them roll out campaigns faster than ever, with quality checks built into the loop.

Or consider Coca-Cola, which recently tapped OpenAI’s technology in a campaign inviting users to create original artwork and poetry through the brand’s “Create Real Magic” platform. It wasn’t just marketing—it was co-creation, with AI as the engine.

Even smaller brands are following suit. The skincare company Heyday uses generative AI to write personalized skincare tips for customers post-purchase, strengthening retention with a voice that feels human, even though it’s not.

As brands like Nestlé and L’Oréal explore using AI for real-time campaign optimization and tone calibration, it’s clear that marketers are entering a new era: one where brand voice is not just scalable but smart, adaptive, and, when done right, more personal than ever.

Prudential Financial partnered with Adobe and AI startup Gradial to create a virtual employee. This initiative aimed to solve the challenges of producing large quantities of personalized content, as reported by the WSJ.

Hema Widhani, chief digital and marketing officer at the mentioned financial company, told the news outlet, “We are, for the first time, onboarding a digital co-worker in the content authoring space.” 

This movement isn’t limited to financial services. Brands across industries are allowing AI to take on more responsibility, from writing ad copy, drafting emails, and creating product descriptions to even composing thought leadership pieces. Tools like Jasper, Writer, and OpenAI’s enterprise-grade solutions are already embedded in workflows at companies like HubSpot and Unilever. Some companies are training AI on their own brand language to ensure the content it produces feels human, relevant, and, crucially, on-brand.

Customers are pretty good at spotting fake or robot-written stuff. But AI’s getting seriously good at sounding human, especially with personalized info and natural-sounding language. It’s getting harder to tell what’s AI and what’s actually written by a person, especially if it’s based on real-time data. This is a big chance to reach a lot of people with relevant stuff, but only if marketers make sure the quality is top-notch and their brand won’t lose people’s trust.

Because one wrong word, an off-brand joke, or a misunderstood context can damage trust, especially in sensitive industries like healthcare, finance, and fashion. That’s why many companies are adopting a hybrid approach and setting tight “brand guardrails” to ensure AI-generated content stays on-message and on-brand. Therefore, humans oversee and edit while AI drafts and suggests. Others are setting strict “brand voice boundaries” inside the models themselves, using fine-tuning, custom GPTs, and prompt engineering to make sure the AI knows when to be witty, when to be formal, and when to stay silent.