How Startups Can Use AI Without Losing Their Brand Voice

AI has been a hot topic in the business world for the last few years, and startups have been seeing it as the technology that can help them grow at a scale and pace that wasn’t possible before.

However, using AI for efficiency and growth means using it in a way that makes your wins much higher than your casualties.

A report by Boston Consulting Group released earlier this year established a guiding principle of 10/20/70 for resource allocation, if any company wanted to achieve the desired effect AI can bring to a business.

This means that companies must devote 10% of their effort to algorithms, 20% to technology and data, and the remaining 70% must go into people and processes that ensure everything goes smoothly.

That being said, for startups, this can be difficult as they don’t have the capital, resources, and manpower required to uphold this. But using AI for everything or for the wrong things can lead to the brand losing its individual persona. Here’s how startups can use AI without losing their brand voice.

Whether you are using AI agents or just a regular LLM for your startup, the first thing you need to do is define your brand’s voice.

If you take the brand Lush, for example, everything from their product name and description to social captions and copy uses this flirty yet warm identity, which has a playful but soft edge that draws people in.

The brand knows exactly what voice their brand identity has. This makes it easier for their audience to recognize and remember them. You need to decide what kind of persona the voice and tone of the brand would have.

Once you have decided that, you need to create two separate documents. You would build an anti-vocabulary list, which would include corporate buzzwords, AI filler words, and overly formal phrases the AI must never use.

The other would document conversational quirks, which will include real words, favorite phrases, and sentence rhythms you actually use when talking to customers. Both need to be fed into the AI systems to ensure a more accurate representation of the brand.

Also consider creating a list of “on-brand” vs. “off-brand” examples that show AI clear comparisons of previous messaging so it understands your brand’s distinct personality.

Whatever you are using AI for, make human oversight a fundamental part of the process. Whether you are incorporating it into your management system or if you are using it to handle your billing and receipts, make sure there are people in place to check whether the tool is working accurately.

If you are using automated content, you need to treat any AI-generated output as drafts. This needs to be heavily edited and enriched before you can publish it; whether you use data, quotes, expertise, or experience to fill the quality gaps is up to you.

Even if you have writers working on copy or content, and they are using AI assistance, make sure they, at the very least, use a free AI detector to ensure that the percentage of automation used is less than 70%, as anything more than that would have a lower quality of writing.

As for readability of blogs and social captions, have a team member read the writing out loud to see if it sounds right. When words are read aloud, it helps to see where the writing might be a little clunky and not flowing properly.

When you give AI a prompt, it draws from data that has been fed into its system. That data can be inaccurate, incomplete, and outdated. This is why people end up with poor-quality output, which lacks depth.

This is why you should consider uploading source audio and transcripts into AI to preserve the authentic phrasing and observations. This can be just a quick voice memo after a client call or meeting.

This keeps the information accurate and consistent in the AI. Also, keeping track of that information is vital in case AI makes a mistake or hallucinates, so that you can fact-check with your own records.

Your AI tool should have a dedicated and labeled chat that automatically puts in your company’s context. This means that AI has access to things like the company’s mission, customer profiles, and approved style rules for every generation session.

Make sure to use tools that protect the privacy and security of your business’s and your client’s private data. Some tools sell data to third-party buyers or even use your data to train their models, which is why you need to understand their policies and turn off AI data training manually if needed.

Make sure you are using automation for the right tasks. You can automate structural tasks, letting it handle outlines, summaries, first drafts, SEO research, or generate variations for testing.

If there are any high-stakes tasks, like business decisions or even crucial messages, make sure the task is handled by humans. Managing emotionally critical moments such as public apologies, crisis response, or messages from the founder should be handled with a human touch.

A good practice is to keep essential branding components, product details or decisions, and core services human-led, instead of automating everything.

AI use for a startup can become a double-edged sword if not done right. On one hand, they really need the efficiency that AI can bring to the brand. But on the other hand, it can also take away the edge a small business has, which is making the product or service feel familiar and personal.

This is why AI use needs to be handled carefully, especially when you are trying to preserve the brand voice and identity. Use automation for the right tasks, only automating those that do not need a lot of human attention.

Even when writing content marketing material, using business-generated data, documenting brand voice, and heavily editing the AI output is necessary to preserve the identity of the business.

Violetta Bonenkamp, also known as MeanCEO, is an experienced startup founder with an impressive educational background including an MBA and four other higher education degrees. She has over 20 years of work experience across multiple countries, including 5 years as a solopreneur and serial entrepreneur. Throughout her startup experience she has applied for multiple startup grants at the EU level, in the Netherlands and Malta, and her startups received quite a few of those. She’s been living, studying and working in many countries around the globe and her extensive multicultural experience has influenced her immensely.