Why Every Brand Needs A Challenger Mindset In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence

We’re living through the most profound transformation in business and marketing in decades—and it is being accelerated by artificial intelligence (AI).

But contrary to the hype, AI alone won’t determine who wins. It’s not the companies with the biggest budgets or largest headcounts that will come out ahead. It’s the ones bold enough to challenge old models, move fast, and embrace reinvention.

In this new era, your mindset—not your resources—is your competitive edge.

The Challenger Mindset: A New Competitive Advantage

Being a challenger doesn’t mean you’re small. It means you think differently. You move with speed. You take risks. You don’t settle for “how it’s always been done.” This mindset is more relevant than ever in an AI-driven world where the traditional advantages—scale, resources, legacy—can actually slow you down.

That’s because AI is fundamentally reshaping the competitive landscape. It’s no longer the exclusive domain of the largest companies with the deepest pockets. The same powerful tools once reserved for global enterprises are now within reach of everyone, from startups to established regional players. This shift reduces the weight of scale, and puts a premium on agility, imagination, and the courage to experiment.

In this environment, the brands that succeed are those willing to let go of outdated structures, question assumptions, and build something new from the ground up. They treat disruption not as a threat, but as an opportunity to rewrite the rules.

Reinvention Over Routine

Real transformation requires reinvention—not incremental optimization. Adding a few AI tools to your tech stack is not innovation. The real opportunity lies in rethinking how work gets done: function by function, role by role.

In my own team, we’ve flipped the model. Instead of starting with, “How can humans work with AI?” we began asking, “What can AI do independently?” Once we had that answer, we redefined where humans make the highest impact—through strategy, storytelling, creativity, and human connection.

This shift matters, because the future of work isn’t simply about efficiency. It’s about elevation. AI can take on the operational load, freeing people to focus on what machines cannot: building trust, sparking new ideas, shaping strategy, and connecting with people in ways that data alone cannot achieve.

Reinvention is rarely easy. It requires leaders to dismantle long-standing processes, rethink job descriptions, and create new workflows that may feel uncomfortable at first. But that discomfort is often a sign of progress. A challenger mindset embraces that friction, knowing it’s the precursor to transformation.

This isn’t about replacing people. It’s about augmenting their skills to work at a higher level. AI handles the repetitive, the routine, and the transactional, while humans focus on the irreplaceable. The result? New levels of agility and growth, not just efficiency.

Culture: The Invisible Engine 

Technology is only part of the story. Culture is the invisible engine behind transformation.

You can’t build a future-ready business on top of outdated behaviors. That’s why my team has built a culture of exploration where curiosity is rewarded, failure is reframed as learning, and AI is a tool every team member is encouraged to test, experiment with, and incorporate into their daily workflows.

We’ve instituted “Pause for Learning” days dedicated to experimenting with emerging technologies, and even created internal awards for projects that failed, but taught us the most. This might sound counterintuitive, but rewarding smart failure is one of the fastest ways to learn. It gives teams the psychological safety to test boundaries and move faster.

The real value of this culture is that it creates momentum. When experimentation becomes the norm, progress compounds. Teams begin to share learnings, inspire one another, and take on bolder challenges. Over time, the organization itself becomes more resilient and adaptive.

That culture of experimentation also helps organizations embrace change rather than resist it. When people see that their leaders encourage exploration, they become more comfortable adapting their own habits. This builds resilience—an essential quality when technology is evolving faster than ever.

AI: The Great Equalizer

For decades, large companies relied on scale and distribution to protect their positions. Today, AI removes those barriers.

That means size matters less than speed, adaptability, and imagination. Businesses that act with a challenger mindset—moving faster, experimenting boldly, and thinking differently—will outpace incumbents. In this sense, AI is the great equalizer. It has redefined the basis of competition—it is no longer about resources, but about the courage and creativity to use them differently.

Consider content creation, research, testing, and deployment. What once took weeks can now be done in hours. But the real differentiator is not speed for its own sake. It’s what you choose to do with that speed—how you turn it into new value, new ideas, and deeper connections with customers.

So, the real competition isn’t about who has access to AI. It’s about who applies it most creatively and courageously.

It's Time To Let Go Of The Old Playbook  

In an AI-driven world, we can’t lead tomorrow’s brands with yesterday’s mindset. We need to stop benchmarking against the past, and start building for what’s next.

Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a startup, adopting a challenger mindset is no longer optional. It’s a strategic imperative. In a world where AI commoditizes execution, the only true differentiator is how boldly and intentionally you use it.

That means building teams that value experimentation over predictability. It means creating leaders who encourage reinvention rather than reward routine. And it means designing organizations that treat learning as a constant state, not a one-off exercise.

My advice to every business leader? Stop trying to keep up. Start trying to break through. Focus less on your competitors and more on what your teams are capable of when given the space to experiment and the permission to be bold.

That’s the real competitive advantage now. In the age of AI, the bravest brands will be the ones who challenge everything—even themselves.

About The Author

Teresa Barreira is the Global Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at the digital business transformation company, Publicis Sapient.

This article first appeared in the October 2025 issue of Inc. Arabia magazine. To read the full issue online, click here.