This article was based on the interview with Canva CMO of B2B Meghan Gendelman on keeping your brand strong at scale by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
It’s the question on every board’s agenda, the line item on every budget review, the topic of every leadership offsite: “What is our AI investment?” The pressure to adopt, scale, and show returns on artificial intelligence is immense. We are all chasing the same metrics—faster cycle times, higher output volume, lower cost per asset, and radical productivity gains. The promise of generating content at a previously unimaginable velocity is not just enticing; it feels like an existential necessity to keep pace. And in many ways, it is. The ability to move faster is a genuine competitive advantage.
But in the race for speed, a critical and costly gap is opening up. While one hand writes checks for AI tools that democratize content creation across the entire organization, the other often neglects the very foundation that gives that content value: the brand itself. The investment in brand governance, systems, and infrastructure is not scaling in lockstep with our investment in generative tools. This isn’t a minor oversight; it’s a structural flaw that can silently dilute years of brand-building and millions in marketing spend. The real challenge for enterprise leaders isn’t just about going faster; it’s about ensuring the entire organization is still moving together as one coherent, recognizable entity.
The Measurement Mismatch: Why Brand and AI Investments Drift Apart
The fundamental reason brand and AI investments diverge is rooted in how we measure them. The ROI of an AI tool can appear on a dashboard within weeks, showing tangible efficiency gains. The ROI of brand, however, is a long game, measured in quarters and years. It’s a slow, deliberate climb that moves metrics like share of voice, unaided awareness, and customer lifetime value. As leaders, we’re conditioned to prioritize the immediately quantifiable, which makes it perilously easy to focus on AI’s output without safeguarding the quality and consistency of that output.
Meghan Gendelman, with her experience at scale-focused giants like Salesforce and DocuSign before joining Canva, frames this tension perfectly. She points out that the metrics driving AI adoption are fundamentally different from those that build enduring brands.
“Every board meeting, everybody I know who goes to their boards, they’re literally asked, ‘What is your AI investment right now?’ And AI investments are measured in output volume, in cycle times, in cost per asset, and just productivity gains, right? But brand investments are measured over quarters, over years. And they show up in share of voice, they show up in share of wallet… as a CMO, I spent a lot of money moving that percent up, and I wanna help protect that on the other side.”
This disconnect is the heart of the matter. We celebrate the speed AI gives a salesperson in customizing a deck, but we don’t immediately see the cost when that deck uses a three-year-old logo or outdated messaging. This is death by a thousand off-brand cuts. Each instance seems minor, but compounded across a global enterprise, it creates a chaotic and fragmented customer experience. Protecting your brand investment isn’t about resisting AI; it’s about creating the conditions for AI to scale your brand effectively, not dilute it.
From Brand Guidelines to Brand as Infrastructure
For decades, brand governance has lived in static documents—the sacred brand guidelines PDF, the meticulously crafted style guide, the PowerPoint deck titled Brand_V5_FINAL_Final_USE_THIS_ONE.pptx. These artifacts are often hard to find, difficult to interpret, and nearly impossible to enforce at the speed of modern business. When a regional marketing manager needs to get a campaign out the door now, they will default to what is fastest, not what is buried on a server somewhere. This is where the concept of “brand as infrastructure” becomes so crucial.
Instead of a set of rules to be policed, brand infrastructure is a living, breathing system that is integrated directly into the tools your teams use every day. It’s less of a rulebook and more like the rails on which the train runs. Gendelman explains that this goes far beyond the basics of logos and colors.
“The infrastructure is the layer that lives on top of that, and at Canva we call that your brand system. It’s, like, your tone of voice. It’s your operations. It’s literally, like, sub-brands within a brand… in a world where anybody in any country on any team can create content, you wanna give them that, that framework for them to work within.”
Think about what this means in practice. Your brand’s tone of voice isn’t just a paragraph in a document; it’s a set of parameters that can guide an AI writing assistant. Your approved image library isn’t a separate asset manager; it’s the default source within the design tool. Templates for sales decks or social posts are not just examples; they are starting points with locked elements, ensuring the core message and visual identity remain intact while allowing for necessary customization. This infrastructure empowers the field—the sales teams, the HR managers, the regional marketers—to be both fast and on-brand, removing the friction that leads to inconsistency.
Marketing’s New Mandate: From Centralized Creator to Strategic Enabler
This shift has profound implications for the role of the marketing department. For years, marketing teams have often been the centralized production hub and the final checkpoint for all things brand-related. This model is no longer sustainable. The sheer volume of content required to compete today, amplified by AI, makes it impossible for one team to create or review everything. The role of marketing must evolve from being the sole creator to being the chief enabler.
This can feel like a loss of control, but Gendelman argues it’s a welcome liberation that allows marketing to focus on more strategic work. The goal is to offload the repetitive, low-variability tasks while retaining ownership of the core strategic elements.
“I think marketing should hold onto the judgment, the positioning, the messaging, the overarching narrative that you’re telling, and the visual system… I think what marketing actually would be delighted to give up is the last minute asks in output. ‘Oh, I have this last minute sales pitch. I’ve gotta go make the board deck pretty. I need to have this same tear sheet made in 55 different languages.’ I think actually marketing is ready to give that up as long as… you have that infrastructure and the brand systems that allows people to work within that.”
By building the brand infrastructure, marketing moves from a service desk fulfilling endless last-minute requests to the architect of a system that empowers the entire organization. Their focus shifts to defining the narrative, curating the core assets, and refining the system itself. This elevates the marketing function, freeing up its most creative and strategic minds to work on the big-picture challenges that truly move the needle, rather than resizing the same image 55 times for a performance marketing campaign.
Making the Case: Frame Guardrails as Accelerators
Even with a clear vision, securing the investment and organizational buy-in for building brand infrastructure can be a challenge. When every other department is reporting on speed and efficiency gains from AI, proposing a project focused on “guardrails” can sound like you’re asking to pump the brakes. The key is to reframe the conversation. Brand infrastructure isn’t about slowing down; it’s about enabling sustainable speed. It’s the difference between a chaotic sprint that ends in rework and a disciplined race that compounds gains over time.
To get executive buy-in, particularly from the CFO, the argument must be translated from the language of brand to the language of business operations and throughput. Gendelman offers a practical approach for making this case internally.
“I think the case is easier when you stop making arguments about brand and I want to be the brand police and start making arguments about throughput… Every salesperson wants to be able to move faster. Every regional manager or district manager wants to be able to sell more faster… when you talk about like, here’s a system that allows you to just do this faster and still look and feel like our company, actually CFOs are really into that.”
When a salesperson can confidently and quickly customize an on-brand presentation in minutes instead of hours, that’s a direct increase in sales velocity. When a global campaign can be localized and deployed across dozens of markets in a day instead of a month, that’s a massive gain in operational efficiency. This isn’t brand policing; it’s a strategic investment in reducing friction, eliminating rework, and accelerating the entire go-to-market engine. The guardrails don’t just protect the brand; they pave a smoother, faster road for everyone to travel on.
The era of AI-powered content creation is not on the horizon; it is here. As leaders, our response cannot be to simply unleash these powerful tools and hope for the best. Hope is not a strategy. The enthusiasm for AI’s potential must be matched by a sober, disciplined commitment to building the systems that will channel that potential constructively. Treating your brand as a core piece of your company’s infrastructure is no longer a “nice-to-have” for the design-forward; it is an operational imperative for any enterprise that wants to scale with coherence.
This requires a shift in mindset, in measurement, and in the very role of the marketing organization. It means moving from policing to enabling, from static guidelines to dynamic systems, and from arguing for brand purity to proving business throughput. The leaders who embrace this challenge will not only protect their most valuable asset—their brand—but will unlock the true, sustainable promise of speed and scale that AI offers. They will be the ones who not only move fast but move forward, together.
