Rachel Teoh is Partner and Strategy Director at The Agency of Love and Logic (LOLO), a female-led studio based in Toronto. She leads a diverse portfolio of clients across all areas of brand strategy, applying an approach that reflects the agency’s ethos of balancing business acumen with a human-centered perspective. A strategic thinker, her expertise spans client relations and project management through to internal operations and business growth. Rachel he believes deeply in sound strategic thinking and collaborates closely with creative teams to elevate ideas into innovative, timely, and relevant brand concepts with measurable impact. Over the past decade at LOLO, she has led brand strategy across global hospitality brands including Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts and Hotel Monteleone, long-standing institutional partnerships with MaRS Discovery District and Toronto Pearson Airport, and creative consulting engagements for Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment.
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AI has made design more accessible than ever before. What once required time, teams, and significant investment can now be generated in seconds. For many businesses, that shift is not only appealing, it’s practical. But the growing narrative that AI can fully replace design expertise oversimplifies what design actually is.
At a surface level, AI performs impressively. It can generate logos, color palettes and graphic elements that appear polished and complete at a glance.
In practice, however, these outputs are often inconsistent, lack the structure of a cohesive system, and require significant refinement before they are production-ready. For businesses operating under tight timelines or constraints, they may still be sufficient — but they are rarely final.
AI operates by identifying and recombining patterns from existing data. While it can generate outputs that feel new, those outputs are rooted in what is already familiar, already validated, and already seen. Without strong direction, this tendency leads toward convergence rather than distinction.
And over time, that convergence becomes visible. Brands begin to share similar visual languages, tones of voice, and structures. Nothing is technically wrong, but very little stands apart. In a crowded market, that lack of differentiation can erode a brand’s ability to be remembered.
This is where the role of expertise becomes more important.
AI is not an independent system. Its effectiveness is directly tied to the person using it. Knowing what to ask, how to guide it, and when to push beyond its outputs requires judgment that extends beyond the tool itself. Prompting is often framed as a skill, but in practice, it’s also an expression of taste.
Taste shows up in decisions — what to pursue, what to discard, and what aligns within a specific context.
AI can generate options, but it cannot determine which option carries meaning or relevance. That layer of discernment still belongs to the person behind the process. Two individuals can use the same AI tools and arrive at entirely different results. The difference is not the technology, but the perspective guiding it.
This distinction reframes the role of agencies and designers. Our value is not only in producing design assets, but in interpreting problems, challenging assumptions, and shaping direction before solutions are created. The output is only one part of the equation — the thinking behind it is what gives it weight.
None of this suggests that AI should be dismissed. It is an incredibly powerful tool. It can accelerate workflows, expand exploration, and support creative processes. But it is most effective when paired with expertise not used as a substitute for it.
Ultimately, the decision to rely on AI for design comes down to what a business is trying to achieve. For some, speed and accessibility will outweigh the need for differentiation. For others, especially those competing on brand and perception, that trade-off may carry more consequence.
AI can produce what is possible within a given set of inputs. What it cannot do is define what truly matters for a brand.
That decision still requires human judgment — and over time, that difference shows in how a brand is recognized, remembered, and valued.
