🚨McKinsey declares the "learn once, work forever" era over at CES 2026, with Global Managing Partner Bob Sternfels revealing the firm will deploy as many personalized AI agents as employees by year-end while shifting 25% of back-office roles to client-facing positions—signaling continuous retraining is now an economic necessity, not professional development.

Customer experience is undergoing a seismic shift, and Gladly is leading the charge with The Gladly Brief.

It’s a monthly breakdown of market insights, brand data, and investor-level analysis on how AI and CX are converging.

Learn why short-term cost plays are eroding lifetime value, and how Gladly’s approach is creating compounding returns for brands and investors alike.

Join the readership of founders, analysts, and operators tracking the next phase of CX innovation.

Subscribe here to stay informed and ahead of the curve.

Subscribe now

Here's what most people do with AI content creation:

They open ChatGPT or Midjourney, type "create a character," get something generic, use it once, then ask for something completely different next time. Three months later, their content looks like a schizophrenic fever dream—50 different art styles, characters that change every post, and an audience that can't remember anything.

There's a better way: Build a world first. Let AI fill it in second.

The secret isn't better prompts. It's creating a character bible—a document that defines your content universe, the characters in it, their personalities, and stories. Feed this to AI once, and every piece of content lives in the same cohesive world.

The Consistency Problem

AI is incredible at generating content. One prompt gets you a character illustration, a 2,000-word story, or a video script.

But ask for the same character twice without reference? Two completely different results.

Pixar doesn't start each Toy Story movie from scratch. Marvel doesn't reinvent Spider-Man in every film. Successful content universes have bibles—detailed documents ensuring consistency across hundreds of pieces created by dozens of people.

Now you can do the same... with AI as your content team.

How It Works: The Character Bible Method

Instead of prompting AI to "create a character" every time, do the worldbuilding work once:

Build Your Character Bible:

For each character, document:

- Physical attributes: Exact appearance, color palette (specific hex codes), clothing style, reference images

- Personality profile: Core traits, speech patterns, sense of humor, emotional triggers

- Background story: Origin, key life events, relationships, fears and desires

- Content role: What perspective they represent, what topics they cover

Define Your World:

- Setting (modern? fantasy? your actual business personified?)

- Tone and visual style

- Character relationships and dynamics

- Recurring themes

Feed to AI:

Instead of: "Create an image of a tech entrepreneur"

You say: "Create an image of Alex Chen [paste exact description]. Setting: Modern co-working space. Mood: Focused. Style: Clean vector with [color palette]. Alex is reviewing code."

Result? Consistent character. Consistent style. Consistent world.

The Mini-World Framework

You don't need a Marvel Cinematic Universe on day one.

For a personal brand: 1-3 characters representing different aspects of yourself or your audience

For a business: Personify your product, create customer personas with backstories

For entertainment: 2-3 core characters, one primary setting, basic relationship map

The key is documentation. Once you have the bible, AI becomes your animation studio, writers' room, and art department—all working from the same source.

Why This Matters Now

We're entering the "content abundance" era. AI makes it easy to create hundreds of images, thousands of words, and dozens of videos per day.

But abundance without consistency is just noise.

The brands that win won't be the ones creating the most. They'll be the ones creating the most memorable worlds.

Look at what's working:

Duolingo turned their owl into a full character with personality and consistent voice across TikTok, generating billions of views.

Wendy's built a brand personality so consistent (sassy, quick-witted) that their Twitter became more famous than their ads.

These aren't accidents. They're treating content as worldbuilding, not one-off posts.

What People Are Building

Educational creators: Complex concepts personified as characters (Economics is a stressed accountant, Physics is a skateboarding daredevil) in one universe where characters interact to explain topics.

B2B companies: Their ideal customer is a character with backstory, their product is a guide/mentor, objections are villains, case studies are hero's journeys.

Solo creators: Different expertise facets are different characters, their content journey is a literal story arc, audience members see themselves in characters.

Content agencies: Client brand values personified as character traits, audience segments as different characters, all content tied to one narrative universe.

The pattern: Consistent worlds beat random content every time.

The Execution

1. Create Your Bible Document

```

- World setting and visual style

- Character profiles (physical, personality, background, role)

- Relationship maps

- Recurring themes and tone guidelines

```

2. Generate Reference Assets

- 5-10 images of each character from different angles

- Style guide showing your world's aesthetic

- Color palettes and typography

3. Build Prompt Templates

Reusable prompts for images, stories, and videos that include character bible references.

4. Maintain Canon

Update your bible as you create—add character developments, new settings, relationship changes.

The Results

When you build worlds instead of random content:

- Brand recall increases: People remember characters, not posts

- Production multiplies: Your bible is your foundation

- Consistency is automatic: AI generates on-brand because the brand is documented

- Audience investment deepens: People follow stories, not posts

Early adopters see 3-5x higher engagement on content from character bibles vs. random AI posts.

The difference? Memorable worlds beat forgettable randomness.

What's Next?

The next wave isn't better AI generators—it's better worldbuilding tools:

- Character bible templates for different industries

- Canon management systems tracking continuity

- Multi-modal consistency engines across text, images, video

- AI that remembers your world automatically

The creators building rich, consistent worlds now will have massive moats. Their content will be recognizable, memorable, and impossible to replicate.

The future of AI content isn't generation. It's worldbuilding.

BTW: "Character bibles" originated in TV writing rooms in the 1980s. Star Trek: The Next Generation created bibles over 100 pages to ensure freelance writers maintained consistency. Pixar took this to extremes—every film has a bible consulted thousands of times during production. What took Hollywood decades to perfect, you can now implement in a weekend with AI.

Have an ad concept ready but don't want to deal with expensive shoots or stock footage? ScriptKit lets you generate, curate, and edit AI ads in one platform.

What ScriptKit gives you

Give ScriptKit a shot — go from concept to finished AI ad without wrangling teams or gear.

The Recap: Meta's $2 billion acquisition of AI agent startup Manus is facing unexpected regulatory scrutiny from Beijing after Chinese authorities began reviewing whether the deal violates technology export controls—specifically examining whether Manus needed an export license when it relocated its core team and technology from Beijing to Singapore in June 2025. The move, which has earned the nickname "Singapore washing" among Chinese commentators, is now giving Beijing leverage it wasn't initially perceived as having, potentially allowing China to influence or even halt the transaction. Meanwhile, Washington views the deal as validation that Chinese AI talent is migrating to the U.S.-aligned ecosystem, revealing how geopolitical power is shifting from pure innovation to regulatory control as both superpowers weaponize tech transfer rules.

Unpacked:

xAI raises $20 billion in Series E at estimated $230B valuation with Nvidia and Cisco as strategic investors, exceeding its $15B target—but the company won't disclose if investments are equity or debt, signaling that capital requirements for frontier AI are now opaque and potentially debt-financed as structural instability enters AI valuations.

LMArena hits $1.7 billion valuation just four months after launching AI Evaluations commercial service with $30 million annualized revenue, tripling valuation in seven months as venture capital pours into AI benchmarking platforms that capture network effects around comparative advantage rather than product superiority.

Mobileye acquires Mentee Robotics for $900 million in move CEO Amnon Shashua calls "Mobileye 3.0," demonstrating chip makers are vertically integrating into robotics to secure AI compute demand rather than just selling silicon—a strategic shift from hardware vendor to application owner.

AMD unveils Venice and MI400 SoCs with competitive AI inference performance, finally achieving parity with Nvidia on accelerator design and breaking the de facto monopoly that forced enterprises into single-vendor lock-in for data center AI infrastructure.

Qwen runs 30B parameter model on Raspberry Pi in real-time through quantization, eliminating cloud inference dependency and redistributing AI economics from centralized platforms to edge devices—threatening the SaaS AI business model as on-device deployment becomes viable for complex tasks.

Reddit post alleging food delivery fraud goes viral before being exposed as AI-generated, demonstrating synthetic media now travels faster than fact-checking and permanently compromising trust in user-generated content as platforms scramble to rebuild credibility infrastructure.

California proposes four-year ban on AI chatbots in children's toys, representing proactive regulatory intervention without waiting for safety data—a precedent forcing companies to either fragment markets or redesign entire product categories around jurisdictional compliance.

Spotify lowers monetization threshold for video podcasts, racing to decentralize content production through aggressive creator payouts as a defensive moat against TikTok—signaling platform stickiness is now created through distribution economics, not feature differentiation.

Best of AI™ Team

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.