Small design agencies are reporting a shift in the startup ecosystem. Once, founders would write personal briefs, hoping to catch the attention of a talented agency. Now, AI-generated briefs are flooding agency inboxes, packed with unnecessary complexity and lacking personal touch. This trend is making it harder for startups to connect with the right creatives, as agencies receive identical, over-the-top briefs from multiple sources. The founders of Greatergood® Brands argue that AI briefs are undermining the personal relationships and strategic opportunities that once drove the startup-agency partnership. In an era where AI is supposed to make things easier, it seems the technology is complicating the process of branding for new businesses.

‘The nature of the briefs we’re getting from startups has changed completely in the last year,’ says Daniel Hinde, founder of Greatergood® Brands. ‘It’s gone from “we’re a startup and we only have X amount of money” to briefs that were clearly never written by the founder at all. They’ve been generated by an AI in a matter of seconds, and bulk sent to every agency sitting at the top of a Google search.’

The problem, according to Hinde, is that AI-generated briefs are often overly ambitious and unrealistic for the scale of the startup. ‘They’re completely over-egged,’ he says. ‘They’ll ask for a full strategic proposal covering brand architecture, brand design, brand toolkit, packaging, retail strategy, go-to-market launch strategy, a website, a content plan, for a company that is genuinely one person and a £14.99 subscription to an AI model. A founder this size doesn’t need a fraction of that yet, and often can’t afford even one element of it, but the AI doesn’t know that. It just writes the most comprehensive brief it can generate and fires it out.’

‘It’s much harder to tell which of those founders is worth betting on,’ Hinde continues. ‘Nearly 90% of what lands from startups is impersonal, identical to what every other agency in the top ten search results is receiving, and asking for ten times the scope that startup actually needs. It’s much harder to tell which of those founders is worth betting on.