AI Is Making Perfect Cheap
October 6, 2026
AI made polish abundant. Brands are making the work visible again.
Welcome to this week's Takumi AI Brief.
Marketing has spent years removing friction.
We made production faster. Shoots cheaper. Content easier to scale.
Then AI pushed that logic much further.
An image that once took days now takes minutes.
Which raises a question worth sitting with.
How do you signal value when making something look good is easy?
Some brands seem to have an answer.
Show the work.
01 · The Trend That Actually Matters
Vogue recently described a growing behaviour in fashion as "effort signalling."
CHANEL , Christian Dior Couture , Hermès , Loewe and Abercrombie & Fitch Co. are among the brands leaning into creative that looks deliberately handmade and hard to produce.
Abercrombie & Fitch Co. commissioned Korean artist Min Kyung-jin to make miniature jeans out of pasta.
Yes, pasta.
The Reel passed five million views, well ahead of much of the brand's regular content.
Elsewhere, brands are trying hand illustration, stop-motion, stained glass and physical sculpture.
None of these techniques are new.
The context is.
When polished creative can be produced almost instantly, evidence that someone spent time making something starts to mean something different.
02 · Perfect Is Getting Cheap
Not long ago, a polished image signalled budget, skill and production value.
Increasingly, it signals very little.
Almost anyone can now make something that looks impressive.
That doesn't make AI-generated creative bad. It makes polish less scarce.
And scarcity has always shaped how we judge value.
Luxury knows this instinctively. A handmade object isn't valuable because it outperforms a machine-made one. The time, craft and care are part of what the buyer is paying for.
Marketing may be relearning the same lesson.
Call it the Effort Premium. The extra value a customer gives to something they can see took real time and skill.
AI made perfection cheap.
Effort may be about to get expensive again.
03 ·When the Process Becomes Part of the Brand
Digital marketing trained us to hide the work.
Everything got cleaner, faster and more seamless.
AI takes that to its logical end. Flawless lighting. Flawless composition. Endless consistency.
The risk is obvious. When everything looks perfect, perfection stops being distinctive.
A hand-drawn line, a pair of pasta jeans or a frame of stop-motion says something different.
Someone chose to make this the hard way.
That doesn't mean every brand should turn analogue. That would become a cliché within a season.
The better idea is that the process itself can become part of what the brand signals.
04 · If I Were in the CMO Chair
I wouldn't turn this into another debate about humans versus AI.
AI should remove unnecessary work. Adaptation, localisation and production should all get more efficient.
But efficient isn't the same as meaningful.
I'd ask one question.
Where does visible effort raise the perceived value of our brand?
The answer changes by category.
→ Luxury: craftsmanship
→ Food: preparation
→ Automotive: engineering
→ Hospitality: service
Then I'd sort the work into two piles. Where friction adds meaning, keep it and show it. Where it doesn't, let AI take it.
Not every piece of friction deserves to be removed.
Sometimes the friction is the proof.
The CMO Takeaway
For years, good marketing operations meant making the effort invisible.
AI is changing what that invisibility is worth.
When polished execution is abundant, polish alone stops signalling quality. Care, judgment and craft get easier to notice, because they're no longer required.
That may be one of AI's more unexpected effects on branding.
The future of premium may not look more perfect.
It may look like someone cared enough to do the work.
Mohit Lodha, Founder, Takumi AI .