ArtVersion Principal and Creative Director Goran Paun is among the contributors to “20 Ways Agencies Can Adapt To Evolving Client Needs,” an Expert Panel published by Forbes Agency Council on October 12, 2026. The panel brings together twenty agency leaders to describe the problems clients now bring to their agencies and what those problems reveal about where agency value is moving. Paun’s contribution addresses a pattern ArtVersion encounters across branding, UX/UI, and enterprise WordPress engagements: the gradual drift of a brand across the many surfaces where it now appears.
The Contribution
The panel arrives less than a week after Paun’s October 6 Forbes Agency Council article, “Design Systems Won’t Save Bad Strategy,” which examines what happens when organizations standardize decisions they have never fully examined. In that piece, Paun describes design systems as multipliers. They make chosen patterns easier to repeat across teams, products, and channels, whether those patterns reflect a clear direction or an unresolved question about the customer and the business. Brand coherence carries the same reasoning beyond the component library. AI tools now multiply output in a similar way, and the quality of what they produce depends on how clearly an organization understands what belongs to its brand and why.
Paun’s entry, titled “Protect Brand Coherence Across AI-Generated Content,” reads in full:
“Clients increasingly bring us work that looks finished but no longer feels like their brand. AI makes publishing easy, but websites, products, decks and copy can quickly drift apart. Agencies stay valuable by protecting brand coherence: knowing what belongs, what does not and keeping every expression connected and meaningful. As output gets easier, recognizability becomes more valuable.”
What Clients Are Bringing Forward
The work Paun describes tends to arrive quietly. A marketing team uses generative tools to produce landing pages faster. A product team ships interface copy written in a different voice. Sales assembles decks from templates that dozens of people have edited over time. Each piece passes review on its own terms. Taken together, they describe several companies at once.
This kind of drift rarely appears as a single failure, which makes it easy to miss. It accumulates through small, reasonable decisions made by people working in separate systems, often with tools designed to help them finish quickly. The individual expressions stay polished while the relationship between them weakens. Audiences often sense the inconsistency before the organization names it, usually as a feeling that the company has become harder to read.
ArtVersion treats this as a structural question. Coherence depends on a shared understanding of what belongs to the brand: its visual language, its tone, its priorities, and the decisions it has already made about how to present itself. When that understanding lives in documented frameworks and design systems, teams can produce more while keeping the thread. When it lives in the memory of a few people, increased output tends to outpace it.
A Panel Focused on Visibility and Judgment
Read as a whole, the panel describes an industry recalibrating around two concerns. The first is visibility in AI-mediated discovery. Clients want to know how to stay present in AI search results, and contributors note that media coverage and third-party mentions now shape how language models discover and validate brands. The concern extends to reputation, with clients asking that AI answers describe them accurately and with the right authority. Measurement follows close behind, as buyers are increasingly influenced by answers that never produce a click, leaving traditional traffic reporting with less to say about what marketing actually accomplishes.
The second concern is judgment. Clients now use AI to test agency recommendations before a meeting even begins, which raises the bar for experience and conviction. Across the panel, contributors return to the value of diagnosing problems inside the client’s business and connecting agency activity to the outcomes clients care about most, from qualified pipeline to revenue.
Paun’s contribution sits where these two threads meet. AI systems form their picture of a brand from what the brand publishes and from what others say about it. A brand that expresses itself consistently gives those systems, and the people relying on them, a clearer signal to work from. Coherence becomes a practical input to discoverability as well as a matter of identity, and maintaining it calls for the kind of judgment the panel repeatedly identifies as the agency’s lasting contribution.
How This Shapes ArtVersion’s Work
For ArtVersion, the panel reflects conversations already underway with clients ranging from nonprofits and law firms to Fortune 500 organizations. In practice, protecting coherence means looking closely at how a brand currently appears across its website, product interfaces, presentations, and published content, then building the frameworks that keep those expressions connected as teams expand their use of AI. Design systems, editorial guidelines, and governance structures for enterprise WordPress environments all serve the same purpose. Each gives every contributor a clear reference for what the brand is and how it should behave.
The same line of thinking runs through VERSIONS®, ArtVersion’s research and publishing initiative, which examines design language, interface systems, and the role of human judgment as AI becomes part of everyday creative production.
The full Forbes Agency Council article, including all twenty contributions, is available on Forbes. Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives at public relations, media strategy, creative, and advertising agencies.
About ArtVersion
Founded in Chicago in 1999, ArtVersion is an independent strategic experience design consultancy specializing in branding, UX/UI, enterprise WordPress, accessibility, digital strategy, and visual communication systems. The firm works with organizations to build brands and digital environments that hold together as they grow.