How to reposition your brand around AI

Our approach is distinctive because it doesn’t start with the technology – it starts with the customer and works backwards. That entire philosophy is captured in our proprietary Proposition Engineering™ methodology and built on the idea that brand value comes from clarity, human truth, and deliberate strategic choices.

Most B2B brands are caught between two uncomfortable truths: if they say nothing about AI, they appear behind the curve; if they overclaim, buyers see through it. The goal is to find a position that is both differentiated and defensible — grounded in what your business genuinely does differently with AI, not what you wish it did.

Start with the right question, not the obvious one

When businesses face market pressure, the instinct to do more marketing is almost always the wrong response. More activity without strategic clarity doesn’t solve the problem, it amplifies it. The more useful question is not ‘what else should we do?’ but “what are we trying to be known for, and are our actions reinforcing it?”

For a B2B brand facing the AI moment, this is the right frame. Before a business decides what to say about AI, it needs to decide what its genuine relationship is with AI, and that requires internal honesty, not external messaging pressure.

Use Proposition Engineering: identify your most profitable customers first

The Team’s flagship methodology, Proposition Engineering™, is the structural backbone of how they would approach any repositioning. The methodology is described as an award-winning process for building brands with purpose, helping businesses precisely identify their most profitable customers and develop a purpose-to-impact Blueprint to achieve concrete results. Blueprints that are hardwired into business vision and strategy, backed by hard data and validated throughout.

In an AI context, this matters enormously. Not all of a B2B brand’s customers are equally affected by AI disruption, equally anxious about it, or equally ready to pay for AI-informed solutions. The Proposition Engineering process covers target market definition, brand engagement, new product and service development, marketing and sales integration, employee engagement, and behaviour change. It uses segmentation techniques proven to be 50% more accurate than standard alternatives.

A brand should identify which customer segments find AI most relevant to their pressures and build differentiated propositions around that. It’s about repositioning for effectiveness, not for AI.

The practical implication: a B2B brand shouldn’t reposition around AI in a blanket way. It should identify which customer segments find AI most relevant to their pressures and build differentiated propositions for each rather than crafting a single, vague AI narrative that speaks to no one in particular.

Strategy must be operational, not decorative

Too many strategies are well written and rarely used. The brands that win, in his view, treat strategy as a decision-making system, not a narrative — one that simplifies choices, tells people what matters and what does not, and guides behaviour when trade-offs appear. If your brand strategy isn’t influencing daily decisions, it’s commentary, not strategy.

For B2B brands repositioning around AI, this is a critical discipline. AI repositioning frequently produces impressive-sounding strategy documents and updated brand narratives, but fails to change how salespeople pitch, how customer success teams support clients, or how product decisions get made. We push brands to ask what decisions will repositioning actually change, day to day?

Trust is the central asset so build it deliberately

Trust is perhaps the single most important theme for brands navigating this period of change. As our Applied Behavioural Scientist Mark Hauser has said, “trust extends beyond leadership into systems, culture, decision-making and politics.” Or as our brand activation director Sally Tarbit would argue, “internal trust is inextricably linked to psychological safety, together turning workplaces into high-performing environments where people speak up, take risks, and grow.”

I want to be explicit about the cost of neglecting trust: when it is low or uneven, other interventions are asked to compensate. That means more alignment sessions, more comms, more frameworks. Everyone works harder around the problem without addressing it. And when brand work is brought in to clarify and align, without trust, even the strongest strategy will struggle to take hold.

When trust is low or uneven, everyone works harder around the problem without addressing it. Without trust, even the strongest strategy will struggle to take hold.

For B2B brands repositioning around AI, this cuts two ways. Externally, a brand that can credibly signal trustworthiness around things like data, governance, human accountability, and the reliability of its AI-informed outputs, will consistently outperform one that simply claims capability. And internally, unless employees trust the repositioning and understand their role within it, the business will have a brand this is saying one thing and yet delivering another, which customers notice immediately.

Stay human. It is still the differentiator, not the consolation prize

Human connection will be one of the year’s most powerful differentiators. Authenticity isn’t a trend, but a practice. And being real with customers and clients, especially when things don’t go perfectly, will buildstrust more than any polished messaging ever could.

This is a sophisticated position in the context of AI. We wouldn’t advise B2B brands to simply say “we’re human, not just a machine.” We push brands to demonstrate it operationally: in how they communicate when things go wrong, in the quality of their advisory relationships, in the consistency of their people’s presence. The human element needs to be evidenced, not just claimed.

Embrace the structural break and be a ruthless disrupter of your own status quo

The current macro environment is notably unsentimental. There is, as Rory Stewart put it at a recent event a “structural break,” and businesses need to put geopolitics and structural disruption at the heart of their strategy, not treat it as a side issue. The AI question needs to be framed explicitly around power and dependency: don’t let your business become just another entity dependent on a US-owned black box.

Embrace AI, but with eyes wide open. Be a “ruthless disrupter” of your own status quo and stop playing by the old rules when the rules themselves have changed. For B2B brands, this means the repositioning question isn’t just “how do we talk about AI?” It’s “are there parts of our proposition, our pricing, our delivery model, or our customer relationships that AI makes obsolete and are we honest enough to address them openly?”

What to say to customers: the behavioural science lens

Filter the noise from the intelligence, filter colleagues taking you forward from those holding you back, focus on the people you want to serve, and focus on what you do well.

Applied to B2B customer messaging on AI, this translates into a clear discipline: don’t try to speak to every anxiety or opportunity. Identify the specific tensions your best customers face in relation to AI, whether that’s fear of being left behind, uncertainty about ROI, concerns about data, or pressure from their own boards. Address those specifically and credibly. Less breadth, more precision.

The connected system: brand, culture, and employee experience as one

Finally, client relationships depend heavily on the people delivering them. The most effective organisations work from the outside-in: starting with customer needs, then deliberately designing the employee experience, behaviours and narratives required to deliver on those needs consistently. This requires treating employer brand, internal culture and external brand as one connected system, owned by leadership, not as separate initiatives for HR or marketing.

In practice, this means that an AI repositioning programme which only updates the website and the pitch deck will fail. Here at The Team we would insist that internal communications, employee understanding, and cultural alignment around the new proposition are built in parallel, because in B2B, the brand is ultimately delivered through people, and people deliver what they genuinely believe.

In summary

Our advice to a B2B brand repositioning around AI centres on five disciplines:

• start with data-driven customer insight rather than messaging instinct
• build a strategy that changes real decisions rather than just the narrative
• treat trust – both internal and external – as the most measurable and manageable asset you have;
• make the human dimension of your business demonstrably evident rather than merely claimed; and
• be prepared to disrupt your own proposition if AI has genuinely changed what customers need from you.