AI, Authenticity, and Your Startup’s Brand

This blog was not written with generative AI. Picture this: a real Village Capital communications staffer at her desk, a coffee mug within arm’s reach, a notebook with harried handwritten notes, tackling a writing project on an external monitor with overflowing browser tabs. Not a single generative AI chat window in sight.  

Stay with me: I’m not saying this as a flex. But we’ve all seen the hand-wringing about whether companies are using too much AI, or not enough. From a brand and communications perspective, this blog will explore what it means to find the balance – particularly for startups building their brands from the ground up.

To be clear, this piece does not intend to sway readers one way or another about the power and growing ubiquity of AI in our professional lives. Rather, it explores how AI can be helpful without compromising your brand’s comparative advantage – its humanity. (And yes, all em dashes in this piece are a human writer’s style choice. If you’ve ever worked in communications, especially if you’re older than Gen Z and in communications, you know real writers famously love em dashes.) 

AI can help define your brand and write your marketing copy – but should it?

A cornerstone of each Village Capital accelerator program is the origin stories workshop. The session and their stories are the best way to understand the founders’ “why” – and they really are the best way to illustrate the power of impact entrepreneurship. 

Without fail, these dedicated storytelling sessions bring out the humanity, vulnerability, resiliency, grit, and joy that are at the core of entrepreneurship. We see founders walk away profoundly connected and inspired by each other – and we see what it means to have lived experience informing and guiding solutions to some of the most urgent challenges facing our communities and world.

In fact, centering personal stories of founders and the communities they aim to serve became one of the top priorities when we refreshed our own brand a few years back.

When it comes to defining a company’s unique brand, this human-centered element is essential. As more audiences are picking up on “tells” that AI has been used in a piece of content, one thing is clear: AI shouldn’t be the one writing your brand story. In fact, writers have found that despite its advances, it hasn’t mastered compelling storytelling. When writer Kelsey McKinnon asked ChatGPT to tell her the story of the Epic of Gilgamesh, she found that, despite multiple attempts, the chatbot’s retelling was devoid of textural details, context, and, importantly, the epic’s human feelings of heartbreak and joy.

There are certainly benefits and opportunities to unleash powerful AI tools to streamline work for a small team – especially for startups that may not yet have a dedicated marketing team or lead. But before asking an AI chatbot to write content for your website, social media, or other materials, first take a step back to your origin story and let it inform your overall strategy.

Once you’ve defined a source of truth document for your messaging (talking points), writing style and tone, unique and sharp point of view (as succinct as a sentence or two), target persona, and content pillars – AI can be more effectively leveraged for content creation without setting off your readers’ “AI slop” alarm bells. One great, accessible resource for startup founders (who aren’t communications or marketing people) to define all these elements is Strong Brand Social.

How brands are embracing AI – or not

Startup founders are already familiar with the persistent challenge of gaining awareness and adoption in a crowded marketplace. This is also a challenge online: how can you cut through the noisy, cluttered timelines when other companies are tackling the same problem your company is? 

The short answer: creativity. As many digital strategists will tell you, your audience cares most about how you make them feel.

Digital marketing thought leader Rachel Karten coined the phrase “proof of reality” and the growing trend of brands bragging that real humans made their content. 

As Nikita Walia, Strategy Director at brand and venture studio U.N.N.A.M.E.D., shared with Rachel Karten how AI can be leveraged in the brainstorming process – even using AI-generated images to then redesign (by humans!) and post. As she put it, “The point [of using AI] isn't to replace the creative process: it’s to deepen it.” The distinction here is that AI isn’t the content of the posts; it’s powering the team behind the posts.

Brands that inspire and break new ground in digital marketing – like DuoLingo and so many others – have a common denominator that has more in common with startup founders than you’d think: innovative individuals who aren’t afraid to try something new and innovate over and over again. Of course, this is easier said than done when big brands have all the resources, and startup founders often have neither the time nor the resources. But we see founders using their competitive advantage and origin story having a big impact – including Village Capital alumni like Myri Health, Calificadas, and many others.

Tools and resources that can help you level up your brand, without costing your authenticity

Among the biggest challenges we hear from founders (and other digital communications and marketing professionals) are creating content organization systems and metrics tracking. These are challenges where AI tools can be a boon. In the world of content creation, quantity and speed aren’t necessarily better than quality – but productivity tools can help step in to hand back time for work that requires a founder’s or team’s unique talents and attention. 

Of course, it’s important to consider the risks of handing any of your company’s proprietary information over to an AI platform. If you do use it for generating copy, heed the deets (especially from a cybersecurity standpoint) that you are sharing about your company that you cannot take back. A key step for our own team when using AI-generated content is giving it a thorough human read-through and edit before it goes anywhere.

Conclusion 

Does the Village Capital communications team leverage AI to support our work as a nonprofit that supports innovative startups? Absolutely. We would be remiss not to embrace innovative, emerging technologies that can democratize access to information, enabling us to be more effective in our work. In my own day-to-day life, I use it mostly to shake ideas loose (like having it take a first stab at writing a draft as a jumping-off point) and proofread (though I don’t think AI can ever replace the jobs and critical thinking provided by a great editor).

Often, I remind myself to return to basics to reconnect with my own creativity. Are we losing the age-old art of taking a walk to reconnect with our own thoughts? Have we forgotten what a thesaurus is? As Kelsey McKinnon wrote on X, “The problem with talking about using AI as a ‘tool’ in creative work is that you must put down another tool to use it. The tool you lose for the speed of AI is the ability to commune with what makes you creative, to look for something new, to discover that you’re capable of more.” 

Still, companies and brands (including ours!) need to get their message out the door and in front of the customers and funders they need to reach. For founders working in the fast-paced world of entrepreneurship, taking time to marinate in your creativity is a luxury that falls to the wayside (unfortunately, often, along with sleep). There’s space for both humanity and technology to work together.

With any new technology, there will be evangelists and skeptics. It’s essential to consider both sides of this discourse. As Strong Brand Social founder Katie Wight wrote, “We don’t believe AI is inherently evil or inherently good.” In a space as rapidly changing as AI, keep your own critical thinking skills dialed up, and your brand identity as your north star (embrace the origin story, your company’s POV) while embracing innovative technology that can reroute your precious time and energy to what matters most. 

Looking to grow your startup’s impact with expert support and resources on everything from your brand story to financial model? Check out our entrepreneur programs.