About ARA

The Shift

The audience was always human.
Until just now.

Generative AI reached 53% of US adults in three years. 88% of organisations are now adopting it. Consumers spent $172 billion with it in 2025 alone. AI agents went from completing 12% of human-grade tasks to 66.3% in the last twelve months. (Stanford 2026 AI Index.)

That's not a content channel. That's a new audience — one that doesn't read like humans read, doesn't decide like humans decide, and now sits between every brand and every customer.

For five thousand years, the picture of your brand in a customer's head has been built through the senses — your logo, your colour, your packaging, your scent, the hand-feel of your product, the sound of your name said out loud. Every brand asset ever made was designed to land somewhere on a human sense.

The picture of your brand in AI's head is built from none of those things. AI cannot see your packaging. It cannot feel your product. It cannot hear your jingle. It only reads — and what it reads becomes the picture it carries. Different materials. Different rules. Different frame. That's why brands that won the visual era can quietly lose the AI era.

"Brand After Humans — the strategic question isn't whether AI changes marketing. It's whether your brand was built for an audience that isn't human."

From Discovery to Coordination

Most brands don't need
an AI strategy.

They need to understand how AI is changing the category they're already in.

Three waves are reshaping how brands compete. Wave 1 was content — faster ads, generated assets. Wave 2 is discovery — being findable by AI, optimised for answer engines, structured for retrieval. Both real, both downstream, both already crowded with vendors.

Wave 3 is coordination. AI agents standing between demand and supply — interpreting what customers want, framing the options, narrowing the choice set, executing the transaction. No human at the checkout. No impulse reconsideration. The agent chooses. The agent buys.

In that world, the brands that win are the ones AI already carries the right frame for. Not just retrieved. Not just described. Chosen — inside the demand moments the brand has built itself to win.

2,434%

Increase in LLM-driven referrals recorded by JBL during peak shopping 2025 — from content-level optimisation alone. Marketing Brew, Dec 2025 ↗

That's what Wave-2 surface optimisation can do for a brand AI already understands. Wave 3 is upstream of that — at the level of category meaning, demand logic, and brand role. The frame AI is learning to choose by. The window to deposit that frame is now, before the next training cycle locks in the current state.

Our Work

The Index.

A proprietary 0–100 measure of how AI sees, understands, recommends, and represents your brand — measured against a real competitive set across four frontier models and a live agent-readiness scan. The Index is the standard. "What's their ARA?" is the question.

The Deep Dive.

Beyond the score, ARA delivers the intelligence behind it: why AI is choosing your brand the way it is, where the frame breaks down, and exactly what to publish, syndicate, or restructure to move it. A prioritised roadmap — specific to your brand, benchmarked against your category, mechanical enough to act on this quarter.

Five Dimensions

A1 · STR

Structural Readiness

Whether AI can retrieve you at all.

A2 · SEM

Semantic Clarity

Whether AI tells your story — or someone else's.

A3 · EMO

Emotional Residue

Whether AI carries your cultural narrative, or a competitor's.

A4 · VOI

Archetype, Personality & Voice

Whether your voice survives when the screen disappears.

A5 · REC

Synthetic Customer Recommendation

Whether AI chooses you in the moments that matter.

Clients

ARA works with brand owners, CMOs, and their agency partners. Studies are commissioned on a category basis — a defined competitive set assessed together, providing the benchmarked context that a single-brand audit cannot.

Authenticity is a technical advantage. Real brand love — real purpose, real community, real coherence — gets carried into AI training data as a coherent frame, with distinct vocabulary, higher specificity, and deeper emotional residue than manufactured marketing. Manufactured marketing gets compressed into a category default. ARA measures the difference and shows you how to build more of one and less of the other.

All results are confidential and delivered directly to the commissioning client.

The Founder

Built by someone who has
done this at scale.

ARA was founded in February 2026 by Jared Richardson — a Kiwi graphic designer turned brand executive whose career is a mashup of brand design, strategy and data.

He was Colgate-Palmolive's first-ever SVP & Global Head of Design, transforming a packaging function into a global, design-led growth engine — unifying the Colgate masterbrand across 120+ markets, revitalising icons like Irish Spring and Softsoap, and leading the Hill's Science Diet rebrand that delivered $100M+ in first-year topline. Along the way he shipped the world's first recyclable toothpaste tube, on lines running 17,000 a minute.

Before ARA he built ENDVR, a computer-vision platform giving elite soccer players performance analytics. Earlier he led creative and innovation inside Arnell Group and Fahrenheit 212, and launched gliider, a travel research platform, at SXSW in 2009.

His thesis has not changed: brand is a structural margin engine, not a marketing expense — and brand experience remains one of the most under-leveraged levers of value creation. ARA is that belief, instrumented.

Ara is Māori for pathway. That is the job — a pathway forward for brands in the age of AI.

He lives in Westchester, New York. Husband to a talented graphic designer, cringey dad to two daughters, volunteer first responder — and a former international volleyballer, now coaching his eldest.

Connect with Jared on LinkedIn → See his work →

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Studies typically cover 6–10 brands within a defined category. Single-brand audits are available on request.

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AI is choosing brandsfor your customers.

The audience was always human.Until just now.

Most brands don't needan AI strategy.

Built by someone who hasdone this at scale.

Ready to knowyour score?

AI is choosing brands
for your customers.

The audience was always human.
Until just now.

Most brands don't need
an AI strategy.

Built by someone who has
done this at scale.

Ready to know
your score?