I want to share something I keep noticing across the businesses I’ve been working with recently, because it’s surprised me how consistent the pattern is.

Most of the businesses I sit down with are good. Genuinely good. The people are talented, the work has substance, the commercial story is real. None of them feel like they’re failing. What they feel is that something has gone slightly loose. The leadership team is holding slightly different pictures of what the business is actually for. Decisions take longer than they should. The market is starting to read them as one of many, when they used to feel distinct. The energy that used to compound has started leaking instead.

It’s not a crisis. It’s a drift. And the strange thing about drift is that no single moment is responsible. There’s no decision you can point to and say that’s where it went wrong. Priorities diverged a bit, then a bit more. New pressures reshaped the agenda. The founding idea got buried under layers of context and compromise. One day the leadership team realises they’ve been working on slightly different versions of the company for a year and a half, and the cost of that has been quiet but constant.

Here’s the bit that’s been interesting me. The instinct, when this feeling arrives, is to fix the surface. Refresh the website. Retune the messaging. Run an offsite about values. I get why. Surface work feels productive, it produces something visible, and it’s the language most agencies and consultants speak. But what I keep seeing is that surface work, on its own, doesn’t hold. The artefacts look coherent for a quarter and then quietly stop doing anything. The drift hasn’t been addressed. So the surface work has nothing to anchor to and the business slides back to where it was.

What seems to actually work is going underneath. Treating brand not as a logo or a tagline or a set of guidelines, but as the operating logic of the business. The underlying argument that makes everything else cohere. When the operating logic is sound, the surface looks after itself. When it’s loose, no amount of polish fixes it.

This isn’t a new idea. I think a lot of people in and around brand have been circling it for years. What’s changed, for me, is realising how much of the work that calls itself brand work never actually gets near this layer. It stops at the surface, because the surface is where the deliverables live. The structural layer underneath is harder to access, harder to charge for in the conventional way, and harder to point at when it’s done. So most of the time it just doesn’t get touched.

The other thing I’ve been noticing is how relieved leadership teams are when someone goes there. There’s a particular quality to a conversation when you stop trying to fix the symptoms and start asking what the actual underlying alignment is, between what the business says it is and what it does, between the inside view and the outside read, between the ambition and the operation. A good leadership team can feel within an hour whether that conversation is happening or not. When it is, things start moving differently. When it isn’t, you can sense everyone going through the motions of a familiar exercise that nobody quite believes in.

I’ve been rolling all of this back into the way I’m running engagements, and the methodology is sharpening with each one. That feels like the right way round. The pattern is more interesting than any single session, and the next session is sharper because of the last. I’ve just rewritten the site to reflect where the thinking has got to, in case anyone’s curious to read the more structured version. But the thing I really wanted to share was the noticing, because I suspect a lot of people reading this recognise the drift in something they’re either inside or close to.

If you do, the most useful thing I can offer is the question itself. What’s the operating logic of the business actually doing right now, and where has it stopped holding? It’s a question that’s hard to answer honestly, which is usually a sign it’s worth asking.

The Sharpened

Anyone who’s spent time in multiplayer games knows the rhythm. You drop into a new environment with almost no information. You die a lot. You watch what other players are doing. You gradually piece together the logic of the world, acquire the right gear, figure out which skills actually matter. Then, collectively, the player base cracks it and everyone levels up together.

That’s tech adoption. More specifically, that’s what’s been happening with AI over the last few years.

The Levels So Far

The gaming metaphor works because adoption really does move in discrete phases and each phase has its own dominant meme, its own shared “power-up” that the collective decides is the key to progress.

Level 1: Prompting as craft (2022-2023). ChatGPT drops and overnight everyone becomes obsessed with the idea that asking the question correctly is a skill. Prompt engineers emerge as a genuine job category. The power-up is linguistic precision. Know the magic words. The lore is: the model is dumb but can be coaxed.

Level 2: The 10x operator (2023-2024). The meme shifts. It’s not about the perfect prompt anymore, it’s about workflow. Who can stitch tools together fastest? The power-up is system design, automation, chains of thought. The lore is: AI is a multiplier and your value is in how cleverly you deploy it.

Level 3: Vibe coding (2025). Andrej Karpathy’s framing went viral: fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, forget the code even exists. The power-up becomes surrender. Stop trying to control, just direct. The lore: the bottleneck is human perfectionism.

Level 4: Taste (now). The current consensus is crystallising around “taste” as the new differentiator. When the AI can execute almost anything, the person with discernment wins. Knowing what good looks like. The power-up is aesthetic and cultural intelligence. The lore: curation is the new creation.

The Problem With Levelling Up in a Rush

In a game, the levels are designed. Someone architected the progression. “Reality” is a construct. The difficulty is calibrated. The lore is internally consistent. But reality isn’t like that. Its much messier.

What we’re actually doing is a large group of people who share roughly the same information diet, the same conference circuit, the same LinkedIn feed, collectively deciding on a new “truth” every 12 months. If enough respected voices start saying “taste is the new moat,” it becomes the consensus. And once it’s consensus, it functions as truth, even if it’s only half right, or context-dependent, or a useful story rather than a durable insight. This isn’t new. I’ve observed this consensus bubble narrowing tendency for the last 30 years of working in and around tech.

The compressed cycle creates a specific kind of blindness. Each level’s meme feels definitive because it resolves the previous level’s anxiety. Prompting gave way to systems because prompting felt too fiddly and brittle. Systems gave way to vibes because systems felt too rigid. Vibes gave way to taste because vibe coding turned out to produce code with 1.7x more major issues than human-written code. Each power-up is partly a correction, but it’s also a kind of collective forgetting. The previous meme gets abandoned before it was fully understood.

And the self-serving consensus problem is real. The people most loudly proclaiming “taste” as the new differentiator are, almost universally, people with demonstrable taste. Designers. Senior creatives. People who’d benefit from that being true. That doesn’t make them wrong. But it should give us pause.

What The Game Metaphor Misses

In a game, you can reload from a save point. The environment resets. Experimentation is cheap.

In the real world, the things being built during each “level” persist. The vibe-coded apps with security vulnerabilities don’t disappear when the discourse moves on. The institutional habits formed during the prompt engineering phase shape how organisations think about AI for years. The memes don’t just describe adoption, they determine what gets built, which decisions get made, which capabilities get developed and which get ignored.

There’s also a much slower, quieter process happening beneath the meme cycle that barely registers in the discourse. How people are actually changing the way they think. What happens to expertise that atrophies. What develops in its place. One developer found that after relying heavily on AI tools, tasks that used to be instinct became manual and cumbersome , when he worked without them. It’s a transformation.

Every level feels like progress and in many ways it is. But the game metaphor flatters us. It implies we’re solving the environment, cracking the lore, accumulating the right tools. It suggests forward motion.

What it doesn’t account for is everything happening outside the edges of the map. The slow, structural changes. The capabilities we’re quietly trading away. The questions we’ve stopped asking because the current meme makes them seem naïve.

I’ve seen these swarm patterns again and again since I started working in digital 30 years ago. The technological change prompts interest which makes a related solution easier to sell and arriving at a consensus makes it easier still. But in this narrowing so many brilliant opportunities are eclipsed. I always try to be involved in the trend enough to gain a fluency, but remain critical enough not to get entirely sucked in. A vantage point to spot the juicy fruits, whether they’re a consequence of the new technology or not.

Most clean technology does not fail in the lab or on the balance sheet, but on the roof, the wall, the driveway or in the living room. Brilliantly conceived, expertly engineered but pitifully ugly, uninspiring products.

This is not vanity. It is a market failure hiding in plain sight.

I have been watching it play out for nearly two decades, starting with Plumen. Back in 2007 the lighting industry had a real problem. How do you get people to switch from incandescent bulbs to energy efficient ones. Every major manufacturer treated it as an engineering and pricing challenge. We thought that was incomplete. The real question was desire. People do not adopt what they do not want.

So we made a bulb worth wanting. We hung the first prototype at Designers Block and the reaction was instant. A full pager in The Times with my quote “Isn’t it strange, an object synonymous with ideas is so absent of imagination?”

We took the idea to every major global lighting manufacturer. Not one of them was interested. They had already decided what kind of problem this was. Technical. Commercial. End of discussion. So we built it ourselves. Today those same manufacturers all sell well designed premium bulbs. The category we had to force into existence is now expected.

This pattern is repeating itself right now across heat pumps home batteries and solar infrastructure. The engineering is often brilliant. The design absent.

Heat pumps are the clearest example. Large visible and frequently dreadful they are installed around homes as if the people living there are an afterthought. Every ounce of effort goes into performance. Almost none goes into presence. Aria is a rare exception. That tells you everything.

Which brings me to Windfall Energy who launched their home battery this week and took a different approach. They treated it like furniture, not technological gadgetry.

Not a device you tolerate but an object you choose. That is a very different brief. The constraints are real. Batteries are large. Many people live in rented spaces or apartments with nowhere to hide them. The challenge was not to disguise the object but to make it worthy of being seen. Ben King’s solution was simple and radical. Create something that can sit in a main living space with a top surface that adapts to different interiors.

This is exactly the challenge we faced with Plumen. When you introduce something unfamiliar you have to make it feel culturally legible. You have to place it in the same mental category as objects people already love. The iPod did that. They did not apologise for being new. They celebrated it without alienating.

At the Windfall launch event the response was very positive. People were drawn to the object before they understood the function. That is not superficial. That is how adoption begins.

The commercial logic is already there. Battery costs have fallen to the point where potential savings on energy are meaningful. A few hundred pounds a year just by shifting energy use across time. Add a dynamic tariff and smart software and it works. No installation. Just plug it in. For the majority of the country who rent or live in apartments this opens access to the energy revolution that has so far been reserved for homeowners.

But none of that matters if people do not want it in their homes.

This is where design stops being decoration and becomes infrastructure. If the object fails socially it fails commercially and also fails to drive the transition in the right direction.

We are also in the middle of a sustainability disengagement. Not a rejection but a loss of momentum. Some of that is political. Some of it is economic. But some of it is self inflicted. Too many sustainable solutions arrive with the aesthetic sensitivity of a planning notice. They feel imposed rather than invited.

And people resist what feels imposed.

Designers are not going to be invited in. Most engineering led companies still underestimate or misunderstand what design actually does. It is not styling. It is not branding at the edges. It is the mechanism through which new behaviour becomes acceptable. The connection of ideas to culture.

So the burden is on us to prove it. Again and again. Sometimes without permission.

The good news is that the argument is getting easier. When something highly functional can also be genuinely desirable, you do not have to convince people. You remove the friction and the product moves.

The transition does not need more explanation.

It needs desire

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I first met Daljit Singh in Cannes. Not the Festival of Creativity set in sunny June but Milia (multimedia) in a cold, dark early Feb slot. This was 1998 and we got to know each other over a cold beer huddled at the back of an even colder bar. He was running Digit, one of the first genuinely digitally-native design consultancies, doing work that synced closely with what I was doing at antirom at the time. We’ve stayed friends ever since.

Both our careers have taken plenty of turns in the decades since, but there’s a through-line we share: trying to help brands navigate a digital landscape that keeps getting more powerful, more pervasive and simultaneously more complex and fragmented. And in particular, taking seriously the role of experience as a brand-building force, something the industry has been chronically slow to realise.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe about running a consultancy today: generalism is a trap. The landscape is too broad, too competitive, too genuinely complex. I look at things holistically, I always have, but that’s precisely why I understand that trying to tackle the whole ecosystem at once is like trying to boil the ocean. You end up spreading effort across too many disciplines and the strategic focus that should be your sharpest tool just dissolves.

The smarter move is to take a slice. Pick the most important foundational concept and use it as a lateral cut SIDEWAYS through the whole business, connecting product, experience, operations, communications and culture in one coherent line of sight. That’s what trust gives you. Not a soft, woolly aspiration, but an organising force. A lens that forces prioritisation and makes hard calls about what matters most.

One of the benefits of working across as many domains as I have, thirty years spanning digital product, brand, sustainability, fintech, web3, is that you get good at connecting dots that don’t obviously belong together. And the thing about trust is that it’s earned through consistency across all of those contexts. One inconsistency and the whole signal degrades. So the connective tissue matters as much as any individual touchpoint.

Daljit’s position here is rare. As a co-founder of ANNA Money, he’s operated the actual growth levers. He knows from the inside that LTV, NPS, retention, loyalty, brand love are all downstream of trust. These metrics don’t drive trust, they emerge from it. So asking how you earn trust and how you repair it where it’s been damaged, is one of the most commercially important questions a business can answer right now.

We’re starting with a focus on fintech and deliberately so. London is the global centre of gravity for fintech, a genuine cluster of founders, investors, regulators and operators who are all grappling with the same tension: the need to move fast while operating in a domain where trust is the whole product. That concentration of serious, relevant businesses makes it the right place to build a practice and test a thesis.

My own experience is directly relevant here. At Poke I worked on Zopa’s first product iteration, when peer-to-peer lending was a genuinely alien concept and the platform needed to project progressiveness while simultaneously earning trust from complete strangers. Zopa is now a unicorn. We also worked with HSBC after a student loan debacle left them deeply unpopular with a generation of customers, rebuilding trust through a sustained programme of engagement. And more recently, working closely with Publicis we relaunched the UBS brand to drive a recovery from the reputational fallout of 2008, a substantial reframing that required real honesty about what the business stood for and wanted to become.

So I’m not coming at this theoretically. Trust problems are concrete. They live in specific touchpoints, specific product decisions, specific moments in a customer relationship. The work is about designing your way into them.

So I’m very excited to support Daljit in Sideways. And I’m also genuinely excited by the network of collaborators around Sideways: Hem Patel, Alex Light, Greg Reed, Stephen Barber, Chanuki Illushka Seresinhe, PhD and her PhD research, Tom Banks. It’s a serious group.

More at trustsideways.com.

I spent a few years on the Coolbrands council, the annual ritual of picking the world’s coolest brands. That was a while ago. I wouldn’t claim to be the bellwether of cool in any general sense today. But I know a cool car brand when I see one. And I’m not seeing one

WHAT THEY’RE GETTING RIGHT

Tick. Tick. Tick. The Chinese EV proposition on paper is formidable. Vertical integration drives price points that Western brands can’t touch. Specs and performance that compare favourably across the range. Features that would have been flagship territory three years ago are now standard. The engineering story is genuinely impressive. The uptake graph is northbound. So far so good. But not so fast!.

THE TSUNAMI

This isn’t one or two brands testing the water. It’s a tsunami. In the last two to three years, the following Chinese marques have either launched in the UK and Europe or are actively preparing to:

BYD MG (SAIC) Nio Xpeng Ora (Great Wall) Lynk & Co (Geely) Polestar* Zeekr (Geely) Leapmotor (Stellantis) Omoda & Jaecoo (Chery)Deepal (Changan) Voyah (Dongfeng) Avatr (Changan/Huawei) AITO (Seres/Huawei) Human Horizons (HiPhi) BAIC GAC Aion

That’s not a competitive set. That’s a traffic jam! All arriving at roughly the same time, with broadly similar propositions, fighting for the same sceptical Western consumer. In that environment, differentiation isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the only thing that matters.

THE GENERIC TRAP

Every one of these brands has made the same strategic calculation: occupy the middle ground. Don’t alienate anyone. Appeal to the mainstream. The result? They’ve all arrived wearing the same outfit.

The design language is generic. The colour palette is generic. The infotainment UI looks like an Android phone that nobody’s customised and breathed a sense of distinct brand into. The marketing reads like it was written by a committee that’s never heard of culture.

This isn’t a coincidence. It’s a strategy. One that will fail.

WHY GENERIC IS TERMINAL

When you’re trying to establish a brand in a crowded market with no legacy recognition, generic is not a safe harbour. It’s a death sentence. Without distinctive visual identity, without cultural leverage, without anything to anchor loyalty, you’re entirely exposed. The next brand with a slightly sharper price point takes your customers. There’s nothing to hold them.

And the competition is only accelerating. More brands. More similar propositions. More price compression. In that environment, the brands without equity will simply bleed out.

THE MARKETING INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX MAKES IT WORSE

When Chinese brands enter a Western market, they follow a playbook. Engage established auto marketing agencies. Run the standard channels. Target the standard segments. Deploy the standard offer mechanics.

The problem is that auto marketing as an industry is deeply stuck. It built sophisticated machinery for a different era, segmentation matrices, persona frameworks, attribution modelling and mistook that sophistication for progress. The whole apparatus got more and more technically precise about reaching people while quietly forgetting to ask whether anyone actually wanted what it was reaching them with.

Offer-based performance mechanics don’t build brands. They erode them. Every discount is a withdrawal from an account that has never been duly never funded.

The Chinese brands inherit this myopia wholesale. They could do something completely different, build genuine cultural affiliations, activate subcultural communities, use digital-native approaches that create advocacy rather than just moving metal. Cultivate a vibe. Instead they slot straight into the tired playbook and will wonder why the margins keep compressing.

THE OPTIMISATION TRAP

There’s a parallel with performance marketing worth referencing. When you see the world entirely through metrics, when you’re always chasing the bigger number, you mistake optimisation for progress. In reality you’re constantly closing down avenues. The algorithm pulls everything toward the centre. Convergence is the inevitable output of a system designed only to maximise measurable outcomes. This explains the sameness we see everywhere. Not just in cars. Streaming content. Hotels. Coffee brands. Fashion. The relentless pursuit of the addressable market produces a world of extraordinary, suffocating uniformity. Which, as it happens, creates a brilliant backdrop for anything that dares to be different!!!

SO WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE? KIA

Kia didn’t stumble into coolness. They committed to a radical design vernacular and then applied it with total discipline across their entire EV range. Not one bold model and then back to safe. The whole range. Mutually reinforcing. Coherent. Unmistakably Kia.

That repetition matters. It’s what takes a design choice and turns it into a visual language, something that embeds itself in culture, something that becomes recognisable, something that becomes genuinely defensible. You can’t easily copy a language. You can copy a shape.

And crucially, this vernacular belongs to the EV line specifically. The signal is unambiguous: Kia are not hedging. They are not serving the doubters. They are committed to an electric future and they want you to know it. That clarity is itself a premium signal. And all this badged by Luc Donckerwolke incredibly cool and distinctive logo that’s pure, futuristic, confident optimism. There’s an indisputable through line. If I was on the Coolbrands council today they’d be my number 1 in auto.

The evidence that connects their strategy and execution with real value is in the numbers. While the wider European car market shrank 4.1% in 2022, Kia grew to a record 4.8% market share. By 2023, best year in the brand’s history, 572,000 units sold across Europe, EVs making up 38% of that total. In the UK, third best-selling electrified brand, sixth overall. The EV6 won Car of the Year, first time ever for a Korean brand. None of this is accidental. It’s what happens when you commit to a design language and don’t flinch. And I think they’re only getting started as the foundations are still falling into place (e.g. The recent addition of the EV2 which will certainly gain kudos from cool urban customers.)

IF IT’S BROKE. FIX IT

Modern auto marketing has become extraordinarily technical. Nuanced segments matched to ever more niche personas. Attribution models of dazzling complexity.

But it has almost entirely forgotten to ask: is this cool?

Cool isn’t a segment. You can’t A/B test your way to it. But brands that achieve it, brands with genuine cultural magnetism, tend to find that the segmentation problem largely solves itself. People self-select. Advocacy does the heavy lifting. The margins hold.

Chinese EVs have every advantage except the courage to be interesting. The backdrop is so flat that standing up could be almost effortless. So stand up.

Give me a shout if this resonates. I have a very different plan for how this can work.

But technology itself is neutral. Exploitation isn’t physics, it’s economics.

For the last two decades, products were born expensive. Venture capital demanded venture-scale returns. Which meant optimisation, extraction, dark patterns, surveillance… not because builders loved them, but because the maths required them.

Now the cost of making things is collapsing.

If you no longer need enormous capital to create something meaningful, you may no longer need enormous extraction to justify it. Fewer expectations baked into the balance sheet, fewer incentives to enshittify.

So a question:

when the debt shrinks, does the behaviour change?

Maybe this wave of capability doesn’t have to follow the same arc as the last one. Maybe power paired with lower financial pressure produces tools that serve rather than squeeze.

But here’s the thing. If these systems are sophisticated enough to find and exploit our worst impulses, they’re sophisticated enough to find and nurture our best ones. The capability is neutral. The direction is a choice.

Take something as simple and as profound as friendship.

My closest friendships weren’t built through some mystical process. They were built through maths. Hundreds of small interactions accumulated over time. Touchline conversations at Saturday football, week after week, month after month. College friends forged through years of late nights working through problems together. Slowly revealing whether someone’s humour lands the same way yours does. Whether curiosity runs in the same direction. Whether silence feels comfortable or awkward.

That’s pattern recognition. And we’re building systems that are extraordinarily good at pattern recognition.

I’m not talking about replacing the messy human work of actually building a friendship. That still takes time, vulnerability, showing up when it’s raining and the conversation is just about the ref’s terrible offside call. You can’t optimise intimacy.

But think about the waste. How many potential great friendships have you missed simply because the exposure never happened? You were never on the same touchline. Never in the same room long enough. The bottleneck was never compatibility. It was encounter.

Dating apps tried something adjacent and mostly failed, because they optimised for engagement with the platform rather than the quality of what happens after you leave it. Classic wasted leverage. Extraordinary technology pointed at the wrong target.

Now imagine systems trained not to keep you hooked but to spot genuine compatibility. The subtle signals that predict real connection. Complementary humour. Shared curiosity. The kind of overlap that makes two people light up in each other’s company. Not manufacturing intimacy, just dramatically improving the odds of it having somewhere to begin.

And friendship is just one example.

What about learning? Not optimising for test scores but recognising the specific conditions under which a particular person actually absorbs and retains and gets excited by new ideas. What about health, not generic wellness nudges but systems that understand your specific patterns of stress, recovery and motivation well enough to intervene at exactly the right moment in exactly the right way? What about civic life, community, creativity, grief, the process of finding purpose after a major life change?

We’ve spent many years letting the most powerful pattern recognition systems ever built serve advertising. That’s the real scandal. Not that the technology is dangerous, but that we’ve been so spectacularly unambitious with it.

The algorithms already know how to shape human behaviour. The question isn’t whether they can. It’s whether we have the imagination to point them at something worth shaping.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what the common thread is across my work. The urge that joins all the disparate endeavours. The underlying thesis.

I think I’ve got it

It’s “waste”

Not just the literal kind, though that’s part of it, but wasted value in its many forms. Thought I’d share the frame here.

🍟 Literal Waste The obvious one. With

CLUBZERØ, the focus is reducing physical waste in the food and beverage supply chain. With Plumen, it was about stopping people wasting energy by enticing them into choosing efficient lighting (in 2010 when this was a problem to solve).

Important work. Necessary work. But only one expression of the waste pattern.

🍔 Wasted Opportunities The value organisations miss because they’re trapped in groupthink.

At Poke, we saw Mulberry dismiss the mechanics of e-commerce as irrelevant to luxury and in doing so waste a huge opportunity to deliver genuinely exemplary digital service. We put that right, to great effect.

With Plumen, the lighting industry wasted the LED transition disruption by treating it as a purely technical upgrade, producing efficient but joyless products.

Now I’m watching car manufacturers do something similar with EVs, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shed a skin and reinvent themselves, diluted into half measures.

🌭 Wasted Leverage This one is quieter and often more expensive.

When new platforms emerge, companies bring old playbooks instead of understanding what makes those spaces native and powerful.

Mobile became a shrunken desktop. Social media became broadcast instead of a rich conversation. Podcast advertising is sliding toward radio ads instead of embracing intimacy and native audio storytelling.

It’s squandering the leverage you already have by forcing old logic onto new mediums.

🍕 Unrealised Potential The value left on the table if you fail to connect the dots across disciplines to find the synergies, catalysts and accelerants. That’s something I’m working to fix. Most organisations can’t capture this because their structures don’t allow for cross-disciplinary thinking.

🥤 Why Framing This as Waste Matters Here’s the thing I’ve realised. Calling these “opportunities” doesn’t create enough urgency. Loss aversion is real. Organisations move faster to stop losing something than to gain something of equal value.

“You’re missing an opportunity” is interesting. “You’re actively wasting value that’s already yours” sharpens focus.

So when I look at markets in transition, EVs, audio, circular economy, I’m not just looking for opportunity. I’m looking for waste. For the value being left on the table because organisations can’t see it, won’t see it, or aren’t built to capture it.

And right now, when so many teams are battening down the hatches and playing defence, this framing feels useful.

Seeing opportunity as wasted value doesn’t make things bleak. It makes them urgent and actionable. It shifts the conversation from risk aversion to fixing the leak.

#waste

It’s this combination, entrepreneurial product experience and digital creative leadership, that taught me something important: technological disruption alone doesn’t determine winners. The winners are those who find the through line connecting strategy, execution, and brand narrative, who understand that economics, functionality, and meaning must work together.

Automotive is a notoriously closed shop. I’d love to swing in and help, but the industry doesn’t easily welcome outside expertise, something we’ll come back to. I even feel awkward writing this because I know car people will immediately dismiss my POV on account of me not having been hazed into their cult. So I’ll stay on the sidelines and offer a few observations, because right now, I believe we’re witnessing a genuine historical inflection point in transportation.

Mainstreaming

This year EVs are hitting price parity with ICE vehicles in the smaller vehicle segments, where the real volume and impact is. Factor in incentives and lower running costs, and total cost of ownership now genuinely favours electric for many buyers. In many countries, charging infrastructure has reached credible levels, not perfect, but good enough that range anxiety is fading for typical use cases. Battery performance has increased significantly while costs continue to fall, and the vehicle experience is now exceeding ICE in nearly every respect. There’s also new battery chemistries around the corner with the likes of CATL touting sodium based solutions, light on rare earth usage and could shave another 3rd off battery costs within a few of years. So a gap will soon emerge withEV economics really driving a wedge. Government legislation may have weakened under lobbyist pressure, but the tanker is now in full tilt turn without it.

YouTuber Marques Brownlee recently demonstrated the Xiaomi SU7 in this video, a vehicle he concluded would be priced around $100k in the US for equivalent quality, experience, and performance, compared to its actual sale price of around $45k in China. That gap tells you everything about where the technology and manufacturing capability has already reached today.

We’re already seeing acceleration in uptake. UK BEV sales hit 32.7% in December. Once you cross 30% in a market, you typically hit the adoption curve acceleration phase, moving from early adopters to pragmatic majority territory. Norway’s already at 90%+, showing what’s possible.

This isn’t about one breakthrough, it’s about multiple mature technologies and cultural acceptance combining to hit economic viability and scale simultaneously. Four major friction points dissolving at once creates compounding momentum.

Post-pioneer products

What makes this moment different is that manufacturers have learned how to make EVs for normal people, not statements, not compromises, just better vehicles.

The Renault 5 is masterclass product design. They’ve understood that the pragmatic majority doesn’t want revolution, they want familiar comfort upgraded. The AmpR Small platform delivers genuine EV benefits wrapped in something that triggers positive emotional memory. Heritage reimagined rather than future imposed.

BYD’s strategy is even more telling. While Tesla had to sell “the future” to early adopters with radical styling and interface disruption, BYD correctly read that mass market wants conventional good cars that happen to be electric. Boring boxes that work brilliantly. They’ve stripped out the ideological baggage and focused on making cheaper, better transport. That pragmatism is why they’re winning globally while Tesla plateaus.

BMW’s Neue Klasse represents legacy manufacturers finally committing rather than hedging. Five-hundred-mile range and a zen design vernacular show they’ve stopped trying to preserve ICE business models and actually designed EV-first. The fact it took them this long is damning, but the fact they’re here now matters.

The HMI mess

But it’s not all plain sailing. HMI performance and design is a mess across the board. No brand is really nailing it in my view (as someone who has worked with GUI’s for 30 years in some for or other). Some are reaching decent levels of performance, but even those most often lack distinctive personality, typography, and clear graphical integrity.

Even Kia, whose dedicated EV lineup sets the bar for cross-range signature style from an exterior and interior design standpoint, doesn’t follow through with enough commitment in the HMI. A lost opportunity, though they’re the closest to the ideal.

The norm is some kind of skeuomorphic representation, softened to a fault. Button forms and treatments are still borrowed from smartphone vernacular, which misses a trick in establishing new specific forms for the larger, often fragmented screen real estate and the specific needs of a driver in various contrasting contexts.

I still love old Mercedes dial graphics and layouts (pictured above). Porsche too. In fact, I recall hearing, possibly on Nilay Patel‘s Decoder podcast, about Porsche and Apple negotiating over typography (San Francisco) when integrating CarPlay more deeply into Porsche’s HMI. To me, Porsche typography is historically not only the pinnacle of perfection, but also as inextricably linked to the brand as their distinct engine rumble.

As the Brownlee video shows, these driver experience elements aren’t arbitrary add-ons anymore. The degree to which they’re meaningfully integrated into the driver experience directly impacts brand impression. It’s why the SDV, software-defined vehicle, has become such a critical topic lately. Only an integrated stack can fully orchestrate the vehicle, both as a means of moving and as a distinct experience.

The Chinese flood

Which brings us to the commoditisation problem. Nine Chinese brands launched in Europe between 2020 and 2025: BYD , NIO , XPENG , OMODA UK , JAECOO UK , Leapmotor , Zeekr Europe , Hongqi, GWM, and DENZA EUROPE . Five more are launching this year: Exeed, GAC AION Indomobil , IM Motors , Firefly, and Changan Automobile ‘s Deepal and AVATR Global Design Center brands.

That’s fourteen Chinese EV brands in European markets within six or seven years. For context, it took established European manufacturers decades to build their current positions.

The Chinese inbounds are coming in great numbers, and yes, many represent an upgrade in performance and experience over local rivals at their price points, but they also feel very blobby and generic, with little differentiation in how they operate as images and ideas in the marketplace.

The Xiaomi SU7 might be a supremo product, but it still hasn’t forged an ownable signature. It borrows familiar elements from mainly European marques. When everything looks vaguely Porsche-meets-Tesla and performs similarly well for the price, you get paralysis. The pragmatic majority needs clear reasons to pick this one over that one.

The Jaguar gambit

When you see this sea of undifferentiated competence, you can start to appreciate why Jaguar have taken such radical steps with their rebrand. The Chinese inbounds are perfect assimilations of historic European vernacular design, almost as if they’re the result of a prompt: “Please design a medium family crossover that blends the best of a Macan with a Velar, bringing a bit of Taycan into the front, but make it a bit more neutral and anodyne to ensure mass appeal.”

The only way to mitigate the dangers of being sucked into a soupy vortex of averageness is to take a radical sidestep and create a footprint not present in the vast training set of all that has come before.

With the Plumen project we did exactly the same thing. We knew we needed a completely new language to create the space between us and the rest of the slop the incumbents were producing.

You never know, we may come to view Jaguar’s radical dance moves as the pivot of the century.

The closed shop

When scrolling through LinkedIn, it’s clear why this is the case. Automotive is an exclusive club that doesn’t believe valid ideas and expertise from outside could be valuable, an attitude that leads to peril, as we’ve seen with VW’s disastrous forays into software development, only to forge, under duress, an expensive partnership with UX exemplars Rivian.

They need software and experience expertise they don’t have but won’t let outsiders in until crisis forces them.

What needs to happen

We’re at the tipping point. The acceleration from here will be rapid and irreversible. But for manufacturers who want to survive the next phase, especially Chinese inbounds, competent technology isn’t enough. They need brands that actually mean something, clear identity in how they look, how they operate, what they stand for in the marketplace and in culture.

The interesting challenge: building these brands can’t follow the old playbook. You can’t manufacture heritage or bolt on meaning after the fact. Especially when the EV is a new kind of proposition. These companies need to forge distinct identities from the ground up, through design commitment, experiential coherence, and cultural positioning that reflects what transportation actually means today whilst also preparing for the near’ish term autonomous future. Not nostalgia, not borrowed equity, but genuine new signatures for how we move forward.

That's ending.

**Electricity is the forcing function.**

Big tech isn't just consuming power anymore, they're getting into the generation game. Google, Amazon, Microsoft: all circling nuclear. All building their own capacity. When your AI training runs cost tens of millions in compute, you stop treating electricity as someone else's problem.

Meanwhile, homes are electrifying everything. Heat pumps replacing boilers. EVs replacing combustion. Induction replacing gas. The domestic grid isn't just delivering light anymore, it's delivering *everything*.

**The convergence flows both ways:**

Smartness needs energy.

Energy needs smartness.

Your EV isn't just drawing power, it's a battery that can give it back. Your heat pump doesn't run constantly, it learns when to pre-heat based on tariffs and weather. Solar doesn't just feed the house, it negotiates with the grid in real-time.

This is the synergy that convergence unlocks: dynamic, efficient, responsive.

---

**But here's the edge:**

One network. One system. Orchestrating absolutely fucking everything.

Your transport. Your heating. Your computation. Your communication. All threaded through the same intelligent grid.

Incredible power.

Incredibly vulnerable.

We've built redundancy through separation, different systems, different failure modes. That safety margin is evaporating. When the grid is the computer and the computer is the grid, there's nowhere else to fail over to.

The efficiency gains are real.

The risk consolidation is terrifying.

**We're not ready for what happens when everything runs on one heartbeat.**

---

**Which means energy policy isn't energy policy anymore.**

If electricity underpins everything, generation becomes a sovereignty issue. Reliance on outside sources isn't just expensive, it's existential. Resilient, domestic generation isn't a nice-to-have, it's infrastructure defence.

And if energy is power and power is power, then abundance becomes economic strategy.

The energy market needs modernising. Not just for carbon targets or grid stability, but because cheap, plentiful electricity is now the foundation of economic growth. When compute, transport, heating, and communication all run on the same fuel, dropping the price of that fuel supercharges everything else.

**Make energy abundant. Make it affordable. Watch the economy run.**

This isn't about green policy or tech optimism. It's about recognising that we've just made electricity the single most important economic input we have.

Act accordingly.

—

🍟 Fast Food For Thought

—

The Studio Ghibli debacle, unlike anything before, starkly demonstrated the speed and precision of AI’s ability to plagiarise original work. In case you missed it, in March, OpenAI image generator upgrade had clearly chewed through the studios many creations, enabling perfect renditions of their very distinct visual style to be turned to any request. Ten thousand meems later and most of us started getting that icky feeling that even the most exquisite, crafted artistic work of the highest merit was now subjects to the great liquidiser of AI. It made visible the final step in a long progression, an erosion of the value and need for the intricate craft required for design practice over the last few hundred years. This shift has accelerated in recent decades, first with desktop publishing, then with tools like Photoshop and CGI, Illustrator, and others. Even now, designers are still expected to master complex software, workflows, and production processes to operate professionally. But that need and expectation is now rapidly evaporating.

Today, AI systems are used not just for ideation, but also for compiling, setting, and delivering publish-ready assets. The requirement for deep technical knowledge is diminishing as we’re seeing in new features of AI like vibe coding, and with it, the market value of that knowledge and expertise. Where once fluency in these tools was a hallmark of a professional, now it’s becoming the domain of anyone with a browser.

For years, great visual craft itself was a signal of brand power. If you could afford the best studios to produce the slickest work, that in itself had cultural value, proof of budget, focus, and organisational muscle. The biggest brands could afford this kind of polish, and so they maintained an edge. AI threatens this entire model: not just the production techniques and specialist knowledge across the chain, but the very notion of visual superiority as a proxy for power. When AI allows anyoneto produce hyper-polished, fantastical, high, production value work, then production quality stops being a differentiator. It’s no longer a wedge between global enterprise and the local corner shop.

Whenever I’ve talked about design in my businesses, I’ve tried to emphasise expression, a word that seems obvious, but which so many companies, leaders, and teams still overlook. Design, in my mind, is about connecting a consumer with the intention of a company. It communicates that intention through form, colour, language, composition and gesture etc, so that the user understands what the product or brand means. Great design deftly marries this intention with expressive execution. Think of the iPod, the VW Beatle, Concorde, The Chopper, or the Sydney Opera House: iconic, special, differentiated. Each of these designs clearly summons an intention. And yet, looking at most of what surrounds us today, it’s clear that few designs achieve this. Most treat design as superficial styling, a thin film of paint for marketing to apply, not a foundational tool for building long, term brand equity and the subsequent enterprise value.

That’s one of the chief complaints from designers: that clients and agencies treat design transactionally. They respond to surface, level briefs: “Make one like that other successful thing.” Because design isn’t integrated into business thinking, it’s often just spread on top. Up until now, the easiest “spread” has been slick, expensive production, whether in industrial design, print, or film. It’s what CMO’s have been taught at marketing school and what you get patted on the back for at Cannes. We’ve known for a long time how slickness is often irrelevant to today’s consumers and how in the search for authenticity a new anti-design vernacular has emerged, particularly on social platforms where conventional marketing collateral just exacerbates the alienation. I enjoyed watching Ben Jones’s presentations of Unskippable Labs (google), demonstrating that through rigorous scientific variant testing he could prove how consumers sought authenticity over aspirational, high production ads. (Ben has now gone alone and set up

https://sundogs.io/

) So slick has been on a slow, death trajectory anyway, but now with AI that decline is accelerating.

So yes, AI may level the playing field. It may make it easy for anyone to produce slick, competent design. Some may see that as the death of the profession. But I see it differently. I see a renewed opportunity to double down on intention and in crafting that expression, albeit with a radically different approach to the actual making. If the tools make execution easy, then it becomes even more important to ask the questions that precede design: What is this product or service for? What are our values? How are we different? What makes us special, desirable, memorable? How can we bake that into a system that can deliver continuity AND flexibility, to create a constant thread to anchor the brand in the market, but leave enough space for perpetual renewal and upgrade?

Poke, the agency I cofounded in 2001 worked with Orange for over ten years, activating their brand in myriad ways through interactive digital media. We made a never ending web page (the world’s first public iteration, before web pages ended which gen Z’ers might find quite quaint!), a balloon race across the internet, a graphical, animating discussion board, a live, streamed “Spot the Bull” competition and the largest tagged photo of all time up until that point (Glastonbury). These projects were all in some way a response to prevailing tech and cultural trends and what gave us the flexibility to shape-shift so dramatically was that Orange as a brand had been engineered to provide the bandwidth for this constant reinvention. The foundation of Orange was a will to bend the new exciting world of mobile telephony to serve the people on their terms. To humanise technology. The simplicity, distinctiveness and discipline of Orange gave it enormous latitude and freedom. I think brands need to approach these times learning these valuable lessons from the past. If the surface means nothing then you have to dig deeper.

If we can crystallise these foundational principles and wield the new tools with purpose, then we unlock their full power without sacrificing distinctiveness. We can’t rely on superficial cues anymore, they’ll be replicated and outpaced in weeks. Instead, we’ll need to embrace continual reinvention. But as long as that reinvention is rooted in something meaningful, it can build more brand equity, not less.

In fact, I’d argue that with the right configuration, clear intentions, distinctive ideas, agile expression, we’ll build brand equity faster than ever. The cost and complexity of craft has historically absorbed so much attention and budget. As that cost drops, we have both the space and the imperative to go deeper, to ask better questions, and create work that means something.

I feel for those who’ve built their careers crafting amazing things. By embracing these technologies we are sacrificing a lot in what we’ve come to think of as “design”. But design is not dead. In fact the need to corral its power and curate its’ every expression is now more business critical than ever now that there’s ever greater firepower at our collective disposal. The companies that see this opportunity will do well, and the designers that themselves perform a successful shape-shift will be critical collaborators in this mission.

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