AI is creating an inferred brand beyond the brand we deliberately express.

The inference gap is the distance between those two identities.

The INFER framework helps us understand and manage what AI concludes about us.

We all have an individual brand. Our clothes, words, and ideas all project signals about who we are or who we want to be.

I've spent more than 25 years building brands, including senior roles at Ogilvy, where much of my work involved a deceptively simple yet critical question: How do you shape what people think about a company, brand, or individual? Of course, what a brand intends to communicate and what people actually perceive have never been exactly the same. That gap is as old as branding itself and has often kept me up at night.

But AI is changing the calculus because the interpreter is changing.

From Expression to Inference

Traditional branding is largely overt, and that's by design. Companies choose hallmarks that include things like names, logos, colors, typography, imagery, and messages. These are often crafted with extraordinary attention and enormous budgets. The best brands can go deeper and create emotional connections that can make a swoosh or an apple carry meaning far beyond color and typography. It's the formation of a relationship between the user and the brand.

AI encounters a brand very differently. Large language models can draw upon corporate websites, journalism, reviews, research, social commentary, historical references, and just about any online information. Some of those signals are carefully created by the organization, while many are not. AI gathers this material and constructs something like a probabilistic........

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