It's Not That Bad, Is It?

Meeta's answer to the question that marketers, writers and designers are asking her. Plus more notes from using AI in branding projects.

Thank you to everyone who read my last post and wrote in. It feels so good to be back in touch with you. Reading your emails, I found that designers, writers and marketers all asked me some version of the same question: It’s not that bad, is it?

Designers, writers and marketers all asked me some version of the same question: It’s not that bad, is it?

Here is what I think, based on what I am actually observing on the ground.

The More Things Change…

The thing that will protect your career right now is something old and fundamental: the trust your client, your boss, or your colleague places in you. That trust is your real asset, and right now it is both more fragile and more valuable than it has ever been.

When my partner and I built Ray+Keshavan, we were operating in a market where branding was still regarded with suspicion by Indian business. Design was decoration. Brand strategy was a soft expense that finance directors tolerated and CEOs periodically questioned. What got us through board doors was a very specific kind of trust. Clients believed that we would deliver solutions that would work, that would endure, and that we could defend in the language of business rather than the language of aesthetics.

Clients knew that we could defend solutions in the language of business rather than the language of aesthetics.

There was this one instance where we had a standoff with the CEO of the country’s largest multinational FMCG company. He asked if we would put our money where our mouth is and agree to link part of our fee to an increase in sales. We could see this was an unfair situation for us: what happens down the funnel to the sales of a mass good was not something we could control. We also knew that this was an unprecedented offer and so we took it, knowing that it would bolstor our reputation as someone who shared responsibility for high-stakes decisions.

That requirement to be capable, to be accountable for your work has not gone away. But a second requirement sits alongside it, and this is the one most experienced practitioners are underestimating.

How To Be Trusted Today

Today, you must also be able to demonstrate that you have evaluated, experimented with, and formed a clear view on the tools that are reshaping how work gets done. Not because you are expected to be a technologist. But because you can only be trusted if you are not operating with a blind spot. A marketer or designer in 2026 who cannot speak with informed authority about where AI accelerates the work and where it introduces risk, is in the same position as a digital-era holdout in 2006 who thought the Internet was only for cat stories.

A marketer or designer in 2026 who cannot speak with informed authority about where AI accelerates the work and where it introduces risk, is in the same position as a digital-era holdout in 2006 who thought the Internet was only for cat stories.

On my current projects, I have been running every phase of the work through AI tools, partly to move faster and partly to understand where the tools hold up and where they fall apart.

AI is excellent at synthesis and iteration. Feeding it a hundred interview transcripts and asking it to surface recurring perceptions, contradictions, and gaps produces output that would have taken a researcher a couple of months. It also spots patterns that are genuinely insightful.

I am also about to test something I find very interesting: using AI to maintain message consistency across geographies without losing the strategic thread, then using it to flag drift as local teams produce their own content over time. The process involves layering translation tools, cultural prompting, and periodic AI-led audits against the original framework. This is still WIP and I will report back on what works and what doesn't.

The Answer, My Friend…

My answer to the question “It’s not so bad, is it?” is that it depends on you. On the one hand, the fact that a purely speculative doomsday article could move markets is in an indication that no one really knows what’s happening.

But for now, if we focus on what we can control, the marketers and designers who will come through this well are the ones who can sit in a room and say: I have tested these tools in my own work, here is where they change things significantly, here is where they require experienced oversight, here is the mistake we will make if we skip that step and here is where we just need to brainstorm and create, sans machines. That is a completely different conversation from “AI cannot replace human creativity,” which is what most creative folk are still saying, and which their audiences have largely stopped finding reassuring.

You cannot have that conversation if you have not done the work. The most urgent thing right now is not to defend the value of human judgment in the abstract. It is to go and build a specific, tested, honest point of view on what AI changes in your particular domain — and then be the person in the room who can communicate it with confidence.

Go and build a specific, tested, honest point of view on what AI changes in your particular domain — and then be the person in the room who can communicate it with confidence

That combination — the accountability that good practitioners have always offered, plus informed clarity about the tools that are changing how the work gets done — is what will earn you trust. Honestly, that has always been the job.

(This post uses em-dashes confidently)