AI can help small businesses produce and organise creative work, but speakers at AI Vision London warned that using the same tools in the same ways can make brands look alike. Their practical advice: start with the workflow, and keep human judgement in charge of what makes the work distinctive.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
The conference, hosted by Canva, brought together speakers discussing AI in business and branding. Azeem Azhar of Exponential View put the creative challenge neatly: “When machines can make anything, taste becomes the job.” Meghan Gendelman, Canva’s B2B CMO, warned that brands can become indistinct when everyone asks AI the same questions using the same data.
In its account of the event, Small Business Trends also quotes OpenAI’s Elke Karskens advising leaders to “start with the workflow, not the model”. The article’s practical suggestions include experimenting with AI in existing processes, using people to select and refine its output, and bringing a brand’s own perspective and stories into AI-assisted work.
Why it matters
AI can make producing content quicker. But if the brief, source material and choices are all generic, speed may simply help more businesses arrive at the same-looking answer. For small teams, the useful question is not just which model to use, but where it genuinely helps without sanding off the qualities customers recognise.
Our read
“Use AI thoughtfully” is easy advice to nod along to and then ignore. The better test is specific: identify a task where the tool helps, let the team try it, and keep people responsible for the creative choices. If the result could belong to any business on the high street, the workflow has gained speed but lost its point.
What to watch
- Whether small businesses can identify tasks where AI helps without flattening their brand voice.
- How teams make room for experimentation and human review.
- Whether customers notice when AI-assisted branding starts to feel interchangeable.
Discussion spark: If AI makes content faster to produce but risks making brands more alike, should businesses prioritise efficiency or distinctive human judgement?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (11 October 2026, 17:11 UTC)
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