AI has made content creation almost frictionless, and that is exactly the problem. In minutes, tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can produce a well-structured LinkedIn post, a sharp newsletter or a polished YouTube script. The result is not a shortage of content. It is a shortage of distinction.
That is the core warning in an essay by Rohit Sakunia, founder of Art-E Media Tech, who argues that the floor of content quality has risen so sharply that a grey, well-written, grammatically sound sameness is spreading across the internet. In that world, the rarest commodity is a character. Sakunia writes, in effect, that the simplest answer often wins: “Yeh lo, yahi best hai.”
The point matters now because the internet is no longer rewarding merely competent writing. It is rewarding recognizable people. Sakunia says personal brands earn trust for free because the equation is fundamentally different: a face, a voice and a point of view can do work that a logo cannot. That is why Zepto’s Aadit Palicha can post about the chaos and conviction behind building a quick commerce company in India, why Nikhil Kamath can write about money, failure or contrarianism, and why Bombay Shaving Company’s Shantanu Deshpande has been able to spark a national debate with posts about work culture.
The same logic extends to operators and creators who make their expertise legible in public. Karthik Reddy writes about VC realities. Ankur Warikoo packages life lessons in a way no financial services brand can legally or emotionally replicate. Sakunia’s argument is that these are not just strong personal followings. They are peer recommendations at scale.
That framing taps into something older than social media. India is a referral economy at heart, Sakunia says, and peer recommendation has always outperformed advertising here. He compares the instinct to the kirana store owner in Chandni Chowk who has spent twenty years reading customers and knows that trust is built one interaction at a time, not through abstract corporate messaging. Personal branding, in that view, is not a new digital trick. It is an old commercial habit wearing new clothes.
The tension is that institutional trust is sliding just as individual trust is becoming more valuable. Corporate brand-building still matters, but it is increasingly filtered through founder-led or creator-led voices that feel closer, faster and harder to fake. AI can imitate the structure of a post. It can mimic tone. It can even polish away awkwardness. What it cannot easily manufacture is lived experience, and that is what gives a personal brand its edge.
So the answer to the question Sakunia is really asking is clear: in an internet flooded with competent sameness, Personal Branding is becoming the sharper signal because people trust people they recognize, and in India that has always been the shorter path to belief.
