In the largest study of its kind, 80 percent of marketers said they write clear, useful briefs. Only 10 percent of the agencies receiving those briefs agreed. The same research, covering more than 1,700 people across 70 countries, put the cost of the gap at up to a third of marketing budgets spent aiming at the wrong target. Briefs were already the weakest link in creative work. Then teams started handing them to AI.
Why AI raised the stakes on the brief
A human creative fills gaps. Hand a strategist a vague line about younger, bolder, more premium and she reads the room, asks a question in the hallway, and infers what you meant. An AI agent does none of that on its own. It takes the brief literally, works fast, and returns a confident answer to the question you actually asked rather than the one in your head. A weak brief used to cost you a revision. Now it costs a revision at machine speed, repeated across every draft the agent produces.
What an agent needs that a person forgives
Start with the objective, stated plainly. When the BetterBriefs researchers asked what matters most in a brief, 71 percent of agencies and 61 percent of marketers named objectives first, ahead of everything else. An agent cannot infer the goal from tone. Spell it out: what should change, for whom, and how you will know it worked. Then trade adjectives for specifics. Premium means nothing to a model. A price point, a competitor to beat, and two campaigns you admire mean a great deal.
Five things to put in every brief
Keep it to what the work actually needs. One, the objective and the single metric that proves it. Two, the audience, described by behavior rather than age bracket. Three, the one message a reader should walk away with. Four, the hard constraints: budget, channels, legal lines, brand rules. Five, the definition of done, so both a person and an agent know when to stop. If a section does not change what gets made, cut it.
Write for two readers at once
Your brief now has two readers, the person and the agent, and the same discipline serves both. Short sentences. Concrete nouns. No inside jokes an outsider would miss, because the model is the ultimate outsider. Marketers already struggle here. In the same study, 83 percent believed their briefs used clear, concise language, while only 7 percent of agencies agreed. Writing for a machine is a forcing function that happens to fix the brief for everyone.
The brief that updates itself
Most briefs go stale the moment the project moves. A comment in a call, a new stakeholder, a shifted deadline, and the document on the drive no longer matches reality. Multiply keeps the brief alive instead, rewriting it from the files, calls, and messages the team already produces, and turning it into the actions a project needs next. The human still sets the intent. The system keeps everyone, and every agent, working from the same current version.
The teams pulling ahead with AI are not the ones with the best models. Everyone has the same models. They are the ones who learned to say what they actually want. Start with the brief. Book a demo and we will show you how Multiply turns one into work your team, and your agents, can act on.