The Presence Economy Is the Next Great Brand Frontier
Why the most important thing a brand can do right now can’t be generated, automated, or scaled
In Part I of this series, I wrote about AI as rehearsal space — the cognitive interval that prepares us for the conversations, relationships, and moments that actually matter. This is where that argument lands.
We are experiencing the synthetic expansion of our world, and with it, the rediscovery of presence. The Presence Economy is the growing premium placed on lived, embodied, and shared human experience in an increasingly synthetic world. I’ve spent enough time in and around live events to know exactly what’s missing from them.
What follows is what that means for every brand, agency, and organization trying to figure out where trust gets built next.
The Practitioner’s Paradox
I am an AI practitioner. I have been building with these tools since before most agencies had a policy about them. I believe in what AI can do at the ideation stage, the production stage, the distribution stage. I use it every day.
And I am telling you: the most important thing a brand can do right now is get people into a physical space.
That is not a contradiction. That is the whole argument.
If Part One was about what AI is doing to individuals, this is about what a world saturated with AI is doing to the value of physical presence — and what that means for every brand trying to build something real.
The Great Flood of 2025
In 2025, AI-generated content flooded the internet. Not trickled. Flooded. Video, copy, images, campaigns — all of it faster, cheaper, more scalable than anything human hands could produce at volume. The platforms filled up. The feeds became indistinguishable. And somewhere in the noise, something quietly broke.
Consumer preference for AI-generated content has collapsed — from 60% to 26% in three years. More than half of all consumers now disengage the moment they sense a machine made what they’re looking at. McDonald’s Netherlands pulled an AI Christmas ad mid-season after audiences called it, with surgical precision, “soulless.” Coca-Cola’s holiday experiment generated more backlash than brand love. Industrial Light and Magic — the company that literally invented modern movie magic, the people who put the Millennium Falcon in hyperspace — got condemned at their own AI presentation.
This is not a niche reaction. This is not the cultural equivalent of people who still buy vinyl. This is a market signal.
People are not just tired of bad AI content. They are increasingly unable to trust any content at all. Nearly 60% of consumers now doubt the authenticity of what they encounter online. And doubt, once seeded, does not discriminate. It spreads to everything in the feed — the real and the manufactured alike.
The algorithm cannot save you from this. You cannot prompt your way out of a trust collapse.
And here is the part nobody in a content strategy meeting wants to say out loud: the audience learned this from us. We taught them to be suspicious. We flooded their attention with generated sameness until their instincts recalibrated. Now those instincts are working exactly as designed — against us.
Which means the next move is not more content. The next move is the one thing that cannot be generated.
You Can’t Produce the Feeling
“The greatest spectacles are emotions.” — Bono
Bono said this to David Letterman. Not in an interview about music. In a conversation about Ireland — a country rediscovering itself through the collision of tradition, dissent, and community. About what happens when people stop consuming a culture and start inhabiting one together.
He wasn’t talking about concerts. He was talking about the irreducible thing that happens when human beings share physical space at a moment that matters. The emotion is the event. Everything else — the stage, the sound, the production — is just the architecture that creates the conditions for it.
The events industry forgot this. Somewhere between the LED walls and the production riders and the keynote run-of-show, the category confused the container with the content. Brands spent decades building bigger rooms and more impressive reveals — optimizing for what the audience could see rather than what the audience could feel.
AI just made that mistake unforgivable. Because AI can now produce technically flawless spectacle. Visuals. Sound. Narrative architecture. It can generate the stage. What it cannot generate is the collective holding of breath. The person in row seven who doesn’t know why they’re crying. The moment a room full of strangers becomes, briefly, a single organism responding to the same thing at the same time.
That is what brands are actually buying when they invest in live. Not the production. The conditions for emotion. The engineering of the moment where something real happens to someone who will remember it.
You cannot produce the feeling. You can only produce the conditions for it. And that requires people in the same place at the same time.
Consider what women’s football became in the space of three years. Not incrementally more popular. Culturally detonated. The 2023 Women’s World Cup final drew 400 million viewers. The NWSL went from afterthought to sold-out stadiums and Nike signature deals. The Lionesses became household names in a country that had largely ignored them for decades. None of it was manufactured by a content strategy. All of it was witnessed — in stadiums, in pubs, in living rooms full of people watching people play in front of people. The physicality of the validation was the point. You could feel the realness of it from the outside because you could see the realness happening live.
Brands noticed. More importantly, the PR organizations that know how to focus cultural attention on a thing that deserves to be seen noticed. The lesson women’s football taught the industry is not about sport. It is about what happens when you put something genuinely compelling in a room and then build the right machinery to surface its importance to the people who weren’t there. The content followed the moment. The moment came first.
The global event market hit $1.6 trillion in 2026. Experiential marketing sits at $55.5 billion and climbing. 74% of Fortune 1000 marketers are increasing experiential budgets at the exact moment overall B2B marketing spend is declining by 3%. That contrast is not noise. That is a directional bet, made by the largest organizations in the world, with the largest stakes.
The dominant research finding across the experiential industry right now is a shift from events designed to impress to events designed to create belonging. And here is the counterintuitive data point that should end every debate about scale: companies investing in micro-events — 50 to 75 people, intentionally contained — are 15% more likely to hit year-over-year growth above 20%.
Live is the next channel. Presence is the product.
The Irony
The backlash against AI-generated content is real and it is growing. But the answer is not to abandon AI. The answer is to understand where AI belongs — and where it does not.
AI does not belong in the thing that is supposed to feel human. It belongs in the architecture behind the thing that feels human. In the intelligence gathering before a single concept is pitched. In the imagination explosion that happens before a dollar is spent on fabrication. In the reactive environments that make a built space feel alive and specific. In the content harvest that extends a physical moment into every digital channel — for weeks, in clips, in coverage, in conversation.
The brands that figure this out will not look like AI brands. They will look like the most creatively alive, most culturally present, most emotionally resonant brands in the room. Because they will be in the room. And they will have used every intelligent tool available to earn the right to be there.
That is the irony. And it is also the strategy.
AI killed content trust online. AI, used correctly, builds better live expressions so people feel something real. And then the right people — the ones who know how to focus attention on a thing that deserves to be seen — make that real moment matter beyond the room it happened in. In an era where audiences have learned to distrust what was made for them, something witnessed carries a different weight entirely. PR’s oldest instinct — surface the importance of a real thing rather than fabricate the importance of a fake one — is suddenly the most sophisticated move in the playbook.
Four Places AI Earns Its Place in a Live Event
There are four distinct areas where AI is changing what live experiences can be — and what brands should start demanding from the agencies they are about to spend significantly more money with.
Most practitioners are working one or two zones. The opportunity is in holding all four simultaneously, from brief to build.
Intelligence. Before a single concept is pitched, AI can distill what audiences actually want from an experience. Behavioral data, cultural signals, desire mapping, competitive scans — assembled and synthesized at a speed and depth that no research team can match manually. The strategic question that precedes every great experience still requires a human who knows how to ask it. But the intelligence that informs it no longer has to take weeks to surface. This is the difference between going into a brief with a hypothesis and going in with an argument.
Imagination. AI as previsualization engine. Before fabrication. Before a vendor is briefed. Before a floor plan is drawn. AI can build the experience and let you walk through it. The tunnel that takes you from now into the brand’s vision of tomorrow, fully rendered in generative video before a single wall is built. The room that shouldn’t exist yet, pressure-tested before the budget conversation. This is where ideas that would never survive a PowerPoint actually get argued — and where the ideas that seem impossible suddenly become fundable. It moves the creative conversation from description to demonstration.
In-Experience AI. The built environment that responds to the people inside it. Reactive surfaces. Generative visuals personalized to each visitor’s inputs. Spaces that are not the same on Friday as they were on Tuesday — because the audience on Friday is not the same audience as Tuesday. This is not technology as spectacle. This is the oldest storytelling instinct — make the audience feel like the story is about them — executed at a scale and specificity that was not previously possible. The experience stops being an installation and starts being a conversation.
Content Harvest. 72% of attendees capture content during live events. The question is whether that capture is accidental or engineered. In the clip economy, every experience needs to be architected with its afterlife in mind — the clips that carry the story, to which audiences, at which moment, through which channels. The live event is not just an event. It is a content production environment with a live audience inside it. AI processes, sequences, and optimizes the harvest. Human intelligence decides what the story is and why it matters. PR determines which version of that story travels furthest — and to whom.
The harvest is not what happens after the event. It is what the event was always also for.
The Missing Role That Changes Everything
Most experiential agencies have producers, creatives, and technology vendors. Three separate conversations, happening sequentially, each one handing off to the next with some information lost in every transition. The intelligence brief doesn’t fully survive into the imagination phase. The imagination phase doesn’t fully translate into the built experience. The built experience generates content that nobody planned for properly.
What’s missing is not another vendor. What’s missing is a single point of creative intelligence that can hold all four zones simultaneously — someone who understands what the data is saying, can explode it into something imaginative and unbuildable-looking, translate that into a reactive physical environment, and design the content harvest before the first guest arrives.
That is not a producer. It is not a creative director in the traditional sense. It is not a technology consultant.
It is a new role. And right now, almost nobody is doing it.
The brands that find those people — or build those capabilities — will not just produce better events. They will produce the experiences that become the proof of record for what their brand actually stands for. In a world where generated content has devalued the claim, the live experience becomes the evidence.
Where This Goes
Part Three of this series will go deep into the mechanics — how each zone works in production, what the technology enables, what the creative direction requires, and what a brand brief for an AI-augmented live experience should include.
The digital feed is full. The trust is gone. The next beachhead for any brand serious about building something real with its audience is not a campaign. It is not a content series. It is not a platform strategy.
It is a place. Designed with intelligence. Built with imagination. Alive with technology. And harvested — deliberately, precisely, with full knowledge of where each clip needs to land — long after the lights go down.
The most powerful signal a brand can send in 2026 is the one that requires someone to show up.
Build something worth being there for.
Work With Me
Most briefs for live experiences arrive too late and ask too little. If you want to change that — and build something that earns its place in the Presence Economy — let’s talk before the brief is written.
RockPaperScissors was built on a simple belief: that AI and human creativity are not opposing forces. That the best experiences — live or otherwise — happen when intelligence works invisibly behind the thing that feels human. That is what we do.