By KIM WALLS, Fractional & Interim Exec CMO, CEO, GM, CAIO
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THE HUMAN BEHIND THE MACHINE
Most people trying to make AI sound like their brand give it rules: a style guide, a banned-words list, guardrails. I build the layer underneath. I encode how a brand thinks, what it believes, how it weighs a trade-off, where its lines sit and why, precisely enough that the system can handle situations nobody wrote a rule for. Rules cover what you anticipated. Encoded judgment covers everything else.
The work exists because AI writes the average of everything it has ever read. You have felt it: polished but plastic, every choice the most common one. Competent, with nobody home. Years ago I watched an AI describe a founder as "passionate about clean beauty." That phrase had been banned inside her company for a year, because every competitor was saying it. The machine had no way to know, so it went to the most common thing said about brands like hers. The sentence was accurate without being true.
My job is to put a brand permanently above that average, and most of a brand transfers better than I expected: voice, standards, even humor, faster and more faithfully than many people I have worked with.
Taste transfers too. I find it in what a brand turns down. Anyone can list what a brand believes. What it refuses is the more important element: the claim that would sell but is not quite right, the trend working for everyone else. Every refusal gives something up, a sale, a week of easy attention. A brand that keeps giving them up is showing you what it believes, and that cannot be faked. Copying is free. Refusing costs, and that is why taste is rare.
Refusals encode beautifully. A refusal is a decision already made. Once a founder decides what they will never do, I write it in, and the system honors it at three in the morning, long after the employee who knew why has moved on. Much of my work is helping founders and leaders put their beliefs into words precise enough to encode, and they turn up sharpest as a no. But the machine at three in the morning is keeping a decision. It has never made one. That took me years to see, because it hides inside the part that works.
Making one is arriving at the refusal before the market agrees with you, and standing there until it does. I learned that in my father's skincare labs, where a batch could pass every test and still be wrong, and your hands knew before the instruments did. Screens show you what everyone else is doing. Your hands teach you what you will stand behind.
AI just made average free. The work I support now is where I can find the refusals. The work I pass on could have come from anyone, no matter how beautiful the finish. The creative act worth protecting is deciding what you believe. It is the one thing I could not hand to the machines, and I tried.
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