In Short:
- AI is a brilliant research partner, however it's not a strategist. It can help inform decisions made in briefs, but it can't make them for the brief writer.
- Used as a hack to save time, AI produces mediocre briefs: superficial decisions based on category thinking and conventions rather than deep strategic decisions what's best for the brand.
- The real risk isn't weak copy, it's misalignment between marketers and agencies on what the brief is really about.
Generative AI can definite help sharpen a brief and speed it up. But faster isn't always better, and reaching for it too early quietly widens the gap between marketers and their agencies. Recently the IPA (= The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) interviewed us on how AI is changing the brief writing process, for better and worse. This is our own account of that conversation.
We read thousands of briefs and train the marketers who write them, so when the IPA invited us for an interview on whether AI has helped or hurt the brief, we had plenty to say. The honest answer is that it does both.
Our advice, in one line: use AI to inform the decisions in your brief, but don't get AI to write the whole brief for you.
The trap AI is walking into
Before AI enters the picture, it's worth remembering the document it's being dropped into. The brief was already in trouble. When we surveyed the industry, before generative AI reached most marketers' desks, the numbers were bleak.
Although 80% of marketers consider themselves good at writing briefs, only 10% of agencies agree with that same statement;
A massive 95% of agencies are unclear on what the strategic direction is in the briefs they receive from their clients;
3 in 4 agencies (75%) believe that the quality of the last three briefs was not good enough;
60% of marketers admit to using the creative process to clarify what the strategy is.
source: The BetterBriefs project
A great brief defines a clear direction. The most important and most difficult part of writing one is depicting a clear picture of success knowing what you and your agency are actually trying to achieve together. If the marketer isn't clear, the agency isn't clear, and it sets off a circle of confusion and time wasting.
So the real question isn't "can AI write a brief?" It's "Can AI help you get clear?".
Where AI genuinely helps
Let's start with the good bits. We'd happily reach for AI for quite a few tasks and honestly, we're a little jealous it didn't exist when we were junior strategists (many, many moons ago).
Use it for:
Crunching the data informing the brief. A brief is a hunt for relationships in a sea of information. AI is awesome at analysing large amounts of data and information from different sources and cases that can sharpen both the brief and the picture of success.
Understanding the audience. We are rarely the people we're write the brief for. AI is one fast way to dig into audience data and get a snapshot of who they are and what they're into.
Finding conventions to break. Ask AI what the status quo in a category is. Ask it to design the worst possible campaign, then go and do the opposite. Understanding this will help shape better strategic decision-making in briefs.
The line we hold:
Inform, don't decide. AI is great at making brief writers make better decisions. However,, it is not (yet) sophisticated enough to make the strategic marketing decisions that are so crucial to briefs.
A coach, not an author. Our own AI brief tool works as a coach. It questions you; it doesn't answer for you.
Here's a hack for you. Use AI to analyse a bunch of previous campaign results and mix in your brand health data. Ask it to identify patterns and causal relationships between objectives and outcomes. That's data-crunching at a scale and speed no marketer or strategist can match. It also feeds a sharper picture of success. AI is a brilliant research partner and a data crunching provocateur. However, it pleases too much and it doesn't — yet — think like a seasoned strategist.
Where AI quietly works against you
The risks here are easy to miss because they don't always show up as obvious mistakes. What seasoned marketers and strategists bring is going deep: asking why, again and again, until you reach something more deep and true about how people relate to your product or brand. AI doesn't always go deep enough with proper prompting. It prefers to take the rational path. It doesn't keep exploring the deeper "why" questions, and that's exactly what shapes a meaningful understanding of the audience and a sharp brief.
Left unchecked, the brief degrades into a checklist, a sequence of stages and boxes to be ticked rather than a series of really well considered decisions. And underneath it all, the skill of brief writing quietly erodes.
The trap that widens the gap
BetterBriefs exists because of the disconnect between what agencies think a good brief is and what marketers actually deliver. If that gap already exists, AI briefs won't help to close it and there's a real chance the gap will actually widen. The clearest example is using AI to dodge a hard conversation.
Some agencies use AI to sensecheck a weak brief and then say, "tThisisn't just our opinion, this is what the analysis says." That's a cop-out. Strong relationships between brands and agencies have a culture of challenge: both sides question each other's thinking and work through disconnects together. As an agency professional, you should be able to argue why a brief isn't ready. You don't need AI for that.
There's a trust cost too. Some clients are quietly sceptical about the usage of AI wondering whether they're getting the agency's best, deepest thinking, or just its fastest. Are we getting better output, or only quicker output?
Craft it yourself, then defend it
We completely understand why time-poor marketers reach for ChatGPT to write their briefs to claw back some precious time. However, this approach will cost them more time in the end. No matter how clever the tool is, the brief it hands you back will be mediocre. Most of the decisions in it land exactly where you'd expect, in line with category thinking, rather than somewhere deeply strategic. As a result the agency can't go deep and will come back with a wide range of shallow, mediocre ideas. Poor brief in = poor ideas out. Ultimately it will lead to additional rounds of rework.
If AI becomes a shortcut, rushing to hit a deadline, needing something fast, it's a false economy. You end up with something that doesn't do the job, because you prioritised speed over quality of thought. If you want the practical version of this, we wrote an article on how to use AI without looking like you used AI and another on why AI can't write the brief for you.
So in our opinion, don't outsource all the thinking that goes into a good marketing brief. AI helps you make better decisions in briefs, however it can't do the decision making for you.
The long game
We're optimistic, oddly enough. We bet that in two or three years the industry will get so consistent, so good at structuring briefs and ideas, that the value of chaos will be embraced again. Creativity can't flourish inside a highly structured and controlled environment. The best thinking and ideas often leaps to unexpected and new places. That leap in thinking often originates in unexpected places, contrarian thinking, irrational combinations and the subconscious. Which points at the real fault line:
An idea is two things put together that haven't been put together before. That's irrational. AI is all about logic, structure and efficiency but our industry is about creativity and human understanding. That's where the tension between AI and creative excellence will always sit. And human understanding is still the main thing that shapes the brief!
First published by the IPA as “How has AI impacted the brief?”, reported by Conor Nichols for the IPAi Forum, June 2026. This is our own account of that conversation; quotes are drawn from the interview with BetterBriefs co-founders Matt Davies and Pieter-Paul von Weiler.
About us:
Matt Davies is the co-founder of BetterBriefs, an advisory and training business that helps marketers write better briefs and deliver more impactful ideas. A highly awarded former agency strategist, having worked at Clemenger BBDO, Design Bridge, Arnold Worldwide, AJF Partnership, as well as running his own agency.
Together with co-founder Pieter-Paul von Weiler, he wrote the BetterBriefs Project and The Best Way for a Client to Brief an Agency, a practical guide for marketers to improve the quality of briefs, co-authored by Mark Ritson and published in partnership with the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA). Matt (together with Pieter-Paul) also led the BetterIdeas Project, a global study exposing the poor state of the creative evaluation process. The study aims to improve the creative decision-making and evaluation practices and was launched in partnership with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the IPA.