A few years ago, writing for Forbes, I called it Metarketing: a reset the marketing function would have to live through whether it wanted to or not. The diagnosis then was a crisis of relevance. The prescription was harder thinking, not faster execution.
Three years and one generative revolution later, the crisis has a new chapter, and a name.
I call it Generated Artificial Leadership.
It is the leadership-shaped output produced by organizations when AI is asked to compensate for decisions that were never made. The brand voice no one defined. The audience no one chose. The point of view no one took. AI does not create these gaps. It exposes them, at scale, in public, in days rather than years.
Most marketing and branding leaders assumed the answer to relevance was automation. They bought the tools, accelerated production, rebuilt the funnel. They are now living inside a paradox: teams cannot be aligned through machines. What used to hide inside slow processes now shows up instantly in the output.
In preparation for Metarketing: The Hard Pivot, a series we are launching this year, I spent time with my old friend Amit Shankardass, a CMO whose career has been a masterclass in pattern recognition. His observation cut to the core: when high-speed execution is available to anyone at marginal cost, speed stops being a differentiator. It becomes table stakes. So what is left?
What is left is the work that AI cannot do for you: deciding what the company stands for, who it is for, and what it refuses to be.
At Unspecials, we see this play out across categories and continents. The companies struggling are not the ones with the wrong tools. They are the ones running a Ferrari engine inside a scooter chassis. A great deal of noise, no real speed, no stability. Each department deploys its own AI stack. Internally, it looks like progress. Externally, the brand fragments in real time.
We have come to recognize five repeating symptoms. Together, they form the operating signature of Generated Artificial Leadership.
The Five Symptoms of Generated Artificial Leadership
1. Scale without alignment. The system multiplies conflicting ideas faster than the team can reconcile them. AI does not arbitrate disagreement. It amplifies it.
2. Production without direction. Output volume climbs while the core brand assets quietly fragment. Activity gets mistaken for momentum.
3. Content without authorship. The work feels generic because no human has taken a stand on what it should be. Nothing is wrong with it. Nothing is unmistakably it.
4. Volume without leverage. The old volume model of more people, more tools, more channels now accumulates friction rather than compounding it. Growth flattens as complexity scales.
5. Optimization for the wrong audience. The linear funnel is gone. Brands are now being read first by machines, answer engines, recommendation systems, generative interfaces, and most leadership teams have not decided what they want those machines to say.
None of these are innovation problems. They are leadership decisions that were never made, now scaled by technology that does not know they are missing. Leadership must provide direction with the clearest point of view, and the discipline to protect it.
So here is the question worth holding yourself to:
What are the three outcomes your marketing must deliver in the next twelve months for the company to win, and what are you actively doing to protect them from being diluted?
If the second half of that question is hard to answer, that is the work. Because if your direction is unclear, AI will not solve it. It will only scale your chaos. Faster, cheaper, and in front of more people than ever before.
If you want to continue the conversationm, you can find me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/gesner/.
