Brand Intelligence for the AI Era

AI is now your fastest growing audience.

ARA benchmarks hundreds of brands across four frontier models and five dimensions of AI legibility, then ranks them within your competitive set by the machine's level of trust — diagnosing strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities, and authoring a growth strategy to move your score.

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
STR / A1
Structural Readiness
Whether AI can retrieve you at all.
SEM / A2
Semantic Clarity
Whether AI tells your story — or someone else's.
EMO / A3
Emotional Residue
Whether AI carries your cultural narrative, or a competitor's.
VOI / A4
Brand Voice
Whether your voice survives when the screen disappears.
REC / A5
Recommendation
Whether AI chooses you in the moments that matter.
Leadership

Jared Richardson

Founder & CEO
Jared Richardson, founder of ARA

Jared is a designer who became a brand executive. His work combines brand design, strategy and data.

He was Colgate-Palmolive's first SVP & Global Head of Design. He turned a packaging function into a global, design-led growth engine. He unified the Colgate masterbrand across 120+ markets and revitalised Irish Spring and Softsoap. He led the Hill's Science Diet rebrand, which delivered $100M+ in first-year topline. He shipped the world's first recyclable toothpaste tube, on lines that run 17,000 a minute. In the #SafeHands COVID response, his team put 26.5 million soap bars into hands around the world, each printed with handwashing instructions anyone could read.

He came up on the agency side. Senior designer at Arnell Group: Reebok's RBK identity, ConEdison. Then FutureBrand. Then Chief Creative Officer of innovation firm Fahrenheit 212, creating new value for adidas, The Coca-Cola Company and Samsung. Then five years as Chief Brand Officer of The Velo Group, building brand experience for Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group, Shake Shack, Audible and Google Play.

ARA is the third company he has founded. The first, gliider, launched at SXSW in 2009. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch covered it. PhoCusWright named it a Travel Innovation finalist. Travel Ad Network acquired it in 2010. The second, ENDVR, is a computer-vision and AI platform. It gives young soccer players the performance analytics the pros get.

His teams' work has been recognised by Fast Company's Innovation by Design, Red Dot, the Clios, Pentawards and CES, including The Dieline's Designalytics Effectiveness Award for the Hill's rebrand. He has judged the ADC and Core77 Design Awards. He keynoted for Dezeen at the London Design Festival. He taught on the MFA Interaction Design faculty at the School of Visual Arts. He turns up on podcasts to argue about the future of brand and design.

His thesis has not changed: brand is a structural margin engine, not a marketing expense. Brand experience remains one of the most under-used 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, with his wife, an uber-talented graphic designer, and their two daughters. He is a volunteer first responder and a former international volleyballer. He now coaches his eldest.

Born and raised in New Zealand. Sharpened in New York.

Connect with Jared on LinkedIn → See his work →
— araco.ai

"Most brands are built to be seen. Very few are built to be chosen — by machines now standing between your customers and your category."

Clients
Who
we
work
with.

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.

The diagnostic is public: your ARA Index score is benchmarked openly against your category. The growth strategy built from it isn't — the specific findings, evidence, and roadmap go directly, and only, to the client who commissioned them.