Brava now has its first principles for the AI era even before looking at competitor work.
What made it easy to write: These five first principles are simply my first principles in creative technology, and now the core of the operation model of Brava.
AI Accelerates. People Originate.
The most respected person in the AI space right now is Yann LeCunn. And having read much of his work and papers on its limitations and what makes it great, it’s the reality that models are predictors and not thinkers.
A creative expression or strategic idea only works when that idea is something the audience doesn’t expect or hasn’t seen.
The way we use AI is where probability is a goal (speed, accuracy, repeatable process) and the ideas remain human.
Automate the work, never the relationship.
The true value of human expression is worth what it costs the sender. A handwritten note tells someone you spent time thinking about them. An AI-generated email auto-sent by your email provider says you didn’t.
We only automate the tasks where humans expect automation and not your attention.
Scale is the most misused word in business. True scale means the customer doesn’t notice as you grow.
Growth means more customers, more engagements, and more impact. No shame in the growth game. That is what nearly every successful company demonstrates.
Scale means more customers, more engagements, and more impact without any tradeoff in the customer experience. You can have trade-offs. the CX cannot. This is what companies think they do but definitively do not do.
Our automations, agents, and creative to pass this test.
For the past twenty-years, self-checkout, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems (“Press 1 for…..) and scripted chatbots have a nearly perfect track record of damaging the reputation of a great brands and piling up hidden costs.
Product is the marketing now.
If the AI search pattern holds, buyers won’t get to your site and creative work. Price, features, and reviews in a comparison table will be how they first experience you. (BRUTAL btw.) They’ll never see your brand campaign.
A product at parity competes on price. So the product needs to be ownable, differentiated, and worth more to the customer than it costs. (This is where brand still matters.)
We are Practitioners. Not Philosophers.
It started pre-pandemic, but the era of the talking head is now met with skepticism in the AI era. You can’t be on a stage any longer without full visibility into how products, teams, and systems work together.
For senior executives and creative tech agencies like Brava, that fluency is recognized or uncomfortably discovered immediately.
Every person working on a client at Brava is an architect, a strategist, and a builder. That starts with the CEO (me) and is non-negotiable.
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