Don’t Be Bland as F*ck: Why AI Isn’t the Differentiator You Think It Is by Kyle Lacy

When every competitor has the same tools, taste is the only advantage left.

Jun 09, 2026

Nobody in GTM Is Talking about Brand

I know I risk our future AI gods reading this at some point and annihilating my entire family because of my opinion, but YOLO. Brand wins.

In every single demo, event, and conversation I’ve had recently about the evolution of GTM and AI, there was not one mention of brand. Not one mention of taste. Not one mention of the power of human-driven creativity.

Not one.

I’m not against AI. We’re building agentic workflows at Docebo. I spend more time in Claude than I do in most other tools. I believe AI transformation is real and that the companies that ignore it will pay for that choice.

But there’s a version of that transformation that terrifies me. The one where marketing gets reduced to a growth function, or even worse, a function that reports to sales or product. Optimized to scale and engineered to be bland as f*ck. Where the output is technically correct, statistically average, and completely forgettable.

If that’s where this is going, I’m out. You can call me old. You can call me traditional.

But I’m going to call the blind shift to all-out AI a mistake.

The Human Is the Moat

Every major technological shift in history has flattened execution and sharpened the importance of human judgment. The printing press democratized text. The internet democratized distribution. And AI is democratizing production.

When everyone has the same tools, the only competitive advantage you have left is the human.

But… not the human as a checkbox. And not as part of the approval workflow. The human as the source of something the machine literally cannot generate: genuine taste, genuine point of view, genuine creative courage.

That’s the moat. And most companies are bulldozing it.

Consensus Isn’t Quality

I keep coming back to the same argument I had with Adam Singer: Most brands don’t have a compliance problem. No, their problem is lack of taste. They’ve mistaken consensus for quality. They’ve run their work through so many layers of approval that by the time it reaches the market, every edge has been sanded off. Adam calls it the “blandification” of marketing. I don’t have a better word for it.

The result is a market full of sameness. Same messaging structure. Same visual language. Same LinkedIn posts. Same event booths, same generic swag.

And now AI can replicate that sameness at 10x the speed.

Congratulations! We’ve successfully industrialized mediocrity.

“Brand vs. Demand” Is a Distraction

Drew Brucker put it simply when we talked on my podcast: “Brand is a controllable moat. Features can be copied. Ads can be outbid. But brand? It’s how you get on the shortlist. It’s how you get remembered.”

The irony is that most operators still roll their eyes at the word “brand,” even as they wonder why their win rates are dropping and their pipeline velocity is slowing.

Here’s what I’ve learned from 15 years of running marketing: the “brand vs. demand” debate is the dumbest argument in the building. They’re not two budget lines. Nor are they competing priorities. They’re the same investment, measured at different time horizons.

Take, for instance, an event: It drives pipeline, builds perception, and helps you to retain customers. It also creates content that runs for six months. Asking whether that’s “brand spend” or “demand spend” is a waste of time because it’s both, and calling it one or the other is a distraction from the actual work.

Don’t screw around. The real question you should be asking your team: Do your customers believe you’re the best at what you do? And is that belief showing up in win rates, deal size, and retention?

If not, you don’t need more attribution software or a cool AI agent. You might need better taste.

Taste Is the One Thing That Doesn’t Have a Vendor

You can’t buy it. You can’t template it. You can’t prompt it into existence. It’s discipline, judgment, and the courage to make choices that most people in your building are too afraid to make.

I wrote the 10 Laws of Good Taste last year, and the one that keeps resonating: Taste isn’t decoration. It’s substance embedded in every single decision. It shows up in the event lighting, the copy on your landing page, the follow-up email after a customer call, the way your sales deck flows.

Anywhere there’s a decision, taste either shows up or it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, your customers feel it. They can’t always pinpoint why, but they feel something is off. And “something is off” is not a place you can run a growth function from.

When Production Gets Cheap, Conviction Gets Rare

Who’s going to win in this race to the blandest? Not the organizations that automate the fastest! It’s those leaders who know what their company stands for clearly enough to make every automated output feel human. That requires a core narrative, and a real point of view. Someone willing to say “this is boring and we’re not shipping it,” even when the calendar says otherwise.

That’s a human job. It will always be a human job.

Protecting Taste Is the Job Now

Rick Rubin can’t play an instrument. But he’s produced some of the most iconic records of our time, because he knows what moving feels like and has the conviction to protect it. That skill doesn’t degrade in an AI world. It becomes more valuable.

I’m building AI into everything I do. My team runs AI Build Days. We’re deploying agents. We’re building faster than we ever have.

And I’m more convinced than ever that none of it matters if we don’t know what we’re saying, why it matters, and how it should feel to the people on the other side of it.

Because agentic efficiency in service of bland output is just fast mediocrity.

The most important thing a marketing leader can do right now is not figure out which AI tools to deploy, but instead, build a culture where taste is protected, creativity is defended, and the human voice inside the work is treated as a strategic asset, not an inefficiency to be optimized away.

Brand is not a budget line. It’s the last moat you have, and the humans are the ones who build it.

While machines will get faster, they will never get taste.

So don’t give yours away.

Kyle Lacy is the CMO of Docebo, an AI-powered enterprise learning, skills, and knowledge platform. He’s spent 15 years building marketing teams inside high-growth software companies, including ExactTarget (acquired by Salesforce), Lessonly (acquired by Seismic for $300M), Seismic, and Jellyfish, before landing at Docebo. He writes Revenue Diaries, a weekly newsletter on marketing leadership, GTM strategy, and the harder questions that lie beneath both. Kyle is based in Indianapolis with his family.