Trends From HumAIn 2025 — And What The New AI Normal Means For Brands

Earlier this month I attended humAIn, Australia’s go-to conference for forward-thinking media, comms, and marketing professionals navigating the transformative potential of AI, and deciphering this new reality we find ourselves in. All of us under the marcomms umbrella are feeling the weight of a shifting landscape—and, in my view, it’s never been a more exciting time to be in our industry.

After having time to distill my thoughts post-event, one thing is becoming clear with AI: We’re not just moving faster, we’re moving differently. AI isn’t simply accelerating productivity, it’s transforming the way we work completely. Here is what brands need to know to navigate this new paradigm.

Creativity is Evolving

Why hire a graphic designer if Google’s Gemini can create an image for you? Why hire a writer if ChatGPT can execute an 800-word blog in mere seconds? These are questions being bandied around by some marcomms professionals as they struggle with diminishing budgets, and as advances in LLMs (Large Language Models) continue to amaze us. 

However, whilst most AI content is technically correct (most of the time anyway) it is often creatively forgettable. And while it lowers the bar for anyone to achieve the ‘average’ of what ‘good’ creative looks like, artistic excellence will continue to stand out aligned with our human judgement, taste, and the campaign’s wider storytelling.

LLMs are pattern recognition machines, therefore are acting on borrowed ideas. And it’s very hard to find new ideas if you’re stuck in a pattern. It takes a nuanced understanding of your audience and the various social, cultural, political, and economic contexts attached to it to hone the right message—that’s where us humans will always continue to play a role.

The bottom line is that while AI is a fantastic tool for sparking creative ideas or executing draft concepts, it takes human intelligence and smart prompt engineering to form creative excellence, merging the best of both human and AI. This approach will be the point of differentiation for brands in a growing world of ‘average’ automated at scale.

From SEO to GEO: Search Is Shifting

With traditional search shifting towards AI-driven recommendations, making your brand discoverable in this new landscape requires influencing the models themselves—enter Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). First, let’s lift the hood on how these models operate.

AI models rely on external signals from public, credible sources to provide accurate recommendations to users, pulling content from what AI considers to be trusted sources. Because of this, editorial exposure like coverage of company announcements and thought leadership are highly regarded by models like ChatGPT and Perplexity. This is making effective PR and top tier media coverage more important than ever to establish trust and credibility, not with just humans, but AI models too. Industry award recognition can also increase brand mentions in AI outputs. 

Models like Copilot, however, favour structured, owned content, meaning a well-designed and developed website (front end and back end) is table stakes for any brand. Elsewhere, Google’s Gemini tends to lean towards academic sources, making research reports and white papers effective assets in not only driving lead generation for your brand, but influencing one of the fastest growing LLMs too.

As marketing and communications professionals, we must now be considering AI models as part of our audience mix. Understanding how to influence them will be critical to raising and maintaining brand awareness, and supporting trust and conversion.

Agentic AI Will Transform Our Approach To Work

After what can be described as the honeymoon period of generative AI, the next phase of this technology—agentic AI—is now knocking on our doors. Make no mistake, this is an industrial revolution on par with the invention of the printing press and it will disrupt our industry, and all of society.

81% of business leaders expect AI agents to be part of their strategy in the next 12-18 months, according to Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index. As a result, human skills in managing these AI agents will be increasingly in demand, giving rise to every employee becoming an ‘AI boss’, no matter their seniority.

So then, in a world where the manual, time consuming, and mundane tasks that are key to the operation of communications and marketing, are being run by a workforce of AI agents, where does that leave comms and marketing professionals? It leaves us room to breathe. It gives us headspace to always be thinking strategically, creatively and proactively. And ultimately, it empowers us to deliver more value.

An AI-driven productivity uplift at the operational level, paired with human-led strategic thinking, presents enormous opportunities for our industry to deliver more interesting and creative work than ever. But we must not settle for mass mediocrity. AI should not be a race to the bottom, instead it should be leveraged as ‘Additional Intelligence’ that provides a force multiplier to human expertise.

The Human Difference

As we integrate AI into our workflows, one truth must remain consistent: humans are the most important asset of the AI revolution. 

Strategy, creativity and communication are not binary outputs; they’re nuanced, complex— and it takes a human to truly understand and connect with another human. AI may support and amplify the work of marketing and communication professionals, but it’s people, their judgement, empathy, and unique perspectives, who will create connection and inspire in this new era.

It is true that we are entering a new paradigm, but the future belongs to those who blend human agency with machine intelligence, using AI to spark creativity, not replace it.

In a far flung future fuelled with AI outputs, the ‘human difference’ will be a brand’s greatest asset.

Image provided on Unsplash by Miguel Henriques.