Sometimes, the Human Is the Brand
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
If you know anything about good coffee, you also know the one served at Starbucks isn’t one. Nobody is hauling themselves there for the espresso. They’re going for the vibe: the slightly performative moment of “ordering coffee”, the handwritten name on the cup, the spacious seating.
Which is why CEO Brian Niccol’s announcement this week reads like an admission. After trying for two years to make operations “lean”, Starbucks is hiring back thousands of baristas and pulling back its Siren System automation rollout. They tried to automate the part that wasn’t actually broken.
Yes, this is an automation story more than an AI one. But the lesson translates exactly, which is why we’re spending today on it.
If you missed the news: Starbucks spent two years rolling out the Siren System, a suite of equipment built to streamline drink-making and let stores run leaner. North American same-store sales fell 1% last quarter. Margins have shrunk five quarters running. Removing labor under the assumption that equipment could offset it just didn’t work out. So they’re walking it back, with around 3,000 stores getting expanded staffing by year-end.
I’ve seen commentaries saying this proves AI and automation don’t work. They are wrong. See what the announcement is not about.
The back office still runs on AI. Demand forecasting, supply chain, equipment maintenance, a new Green Dot Assist tool that helps baristas answer questions in real time, plus a wider generative AI rollout planned for 2026.
What’s getting walked back is specifically the equipment that replaced the human moment with the customer. The barista asking your name and writing it on a cup is mildly annoying. It is also the entire product. Strip it, and you’re charging $7 for an utterly mediocre coffee, which is a much harder business.
This is the same call most marketers are about to face.
Branding? Don’t automate it. That’s identity and taste: the parts of your job a model genuinely cannot do, no matter how many brand guideline PDFs you upload.
Messaging? Mostly don’t. Voice is the part of your brand that’s hardest to fake and easiest to wreck.
Execution? Automate everything you can. Ad variants, reporting cadences, asset resizing, briefing decks, pixel tracking, the seventeen Slack messages you write every Friday explaining what your team shipped. Hand all of it over.
The pattern repeats across categories. Apple Store without the Genius Bar. A boutique hotel where the concierge is a chatbot. Disney with QR codes instead of cast members at the park. Each one looks great on a cost spreadsheet and bleeds customers in real life, because the human is the brand.
Some companies will get this exactly backwards anyway. The visible, expensive, customer-facing automation gets prioritized because the savings show up cleanly on a P&L.
Nobody gets promoted for fixing reporting workflows. And a year later, the investor letter starts to sound a lot like Niccol’s.
— Torsten and Peter
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