The AI Question CPG Brands Are Asking Wrong
Everyone wants to talk about AI search.
Retailers bring it up in quarterly reviews. Founders mention it on discovery calls like they're confessing to something sinister. The numbers behind the conversation are real. By early 2026, 68% of U.S. consumers had used an AI tool in the past three months, and 19% were already letting a tool like ChatGPT help decide which brand makes it into their cart. 44% of people who search with AI now call it their preferred way to find information, ahead of a traditional search engine.
Those numbers matter for a growth-stage consumer brand trying to plan the next 18 months. But when I sit down with clients, the AI conversation almost always starts on the team side rather than the shopper side, because that's where the real opportunity sits today.
The Gap Between the Headlines and the Team Meeting
Most of what I'm seeing right now is still early. Teams are using tools like ChatGPT for writing, for creative concepts, for pulling together images fast. That was true a year ago, and it's still mostly true today. What's changed recently is the appetite. More people are willing to build their own skills and agents: a dashboard that used to take an analytics person a day or more to create now gets built in an afternoon, a quick mock-up or first pass at creative assets that used to wait on an agency now gets started in-house.
Access is part of it. AI keeps showing up inside the tools brands already use. It's built into Shopify, into Adobe, into the Google and Microsoft platforms most teams run on daily. The more available it becomes, the more people experiment with it, which is exactly what I'm watching happen across the brands I work with.
Why Growth-Stage Brands Can't Just Buy Their Way In
The gap is that most emerging and growth-stage brands don't have a chief information officer or a technical team building anything proprietary. They can't commission custom software the way a billion-dollar portfolio can. So the real question isn't whether to build the next great AI product. It's how to use what already exists to work smarter with the team already in the room.
Where I'm Spending My Own Time With Clients
That's where I've been putting my energy lately. We're building vaults and repositories for the things a brand should never have to explain twice: brand standards, positioning, strategy, workflows. We use AI to check that messaging isn't drifting from the strategy everyone agreed on. We use it for project management, to make sure nothing on the list gets missed and nothing gets added that wasn't supposed to be there. We use it to compare document versions with agency partners, so a project stays focused on what it set out to do instead of chasing the next shiny object.
Is It Too Early to Act
Should a brand this size be doing something concrete about AI right now, or is it still too early to bother? I don't think it's ever too early. The technology changes fast enough that the only way to stay on top of it (or as much as possible) is to keep using it. The more I use it, the more use cases I find, and just as importantly, the more I find out what it isn't good for yet. That's worth knowing too. I'd rather tell a team "try it this way, not that way" than tell them not to use it at all, because they're already using it whether anyone approved it or not.
There's a bigger reason not to wait. AI is one of the few tools that lets a smaller brand compete with a much bigger one on a more level playing field. A team of five with the right workflows can move like a team of twenty. That should matter to any brand executive watching every dollar work harder than it did two years ago.
What I'd Tell a CEO to Do Monday Morning
If I'm talking to a CEO on a Monday morning, here's what I tell her to do, because it's the same thing I do myself. Look at where your own time goes, and find the parts that aren't the highest use of you: the parts someone or something else could handle so your attention goes to what only you can do. AI won't replace the judgment that comes from 20 years in a buyer's office. I hope it never does. But used well, it frees up the hours that judgment actually needs.
The shift toward AI-assisted shopping is real, and it's worth watching closely. It just isn't the first fire to put out. The brands ready for that shift will be the ones already running lean and smart on the inside.
Where is your own time going right now that isn't the highest use of your expertise?
PS. I've spent the past year building these same workflows and vaults inside the brands I work with, not because it's trendy, but because a lean team doesn't have room for wasted hours.