What brands can learn from the five best books on AI
Opinion
Phil Rowley recommends five must-reads on AI and outlines the learnings for businesses and brands.
As we approach the end of the year, I wanted to recommend the five best books on Artificial Intelligence I’ve read, or re-read, in 2025. If you’ve not yet read them, perhaps add them to your Christmas list.
Even though the titles below span fiction to non-fiction, science to sociology, ancient history to future events, the insight into the future of AI is inescapably coalescing around common themes that cut horizontally across different academic fields, like the same truth witnessed from different angles.
Thus, there are learnings for businesses and brands here, too, precisely because they will not be exempt from the changes, either.
So, in no order, let’s look at my five top picks:
Human Compatible by Stuart Russell
Elder statesman of AI, Stuart Russell, was awarded the OBE in 2021 for his services to the field. In Human Compatible, he tackles the thorny issue of how, despite humans originating and governing the creation, coding and prompting of AI, it so often misperceives what we truly want. That human-to-machine ‘lost in translation’ effect can often make for poor results, or at worst, dangerous results.
Russell’s thesis states that if AI is to help humans truly, it must not be perfect, but rather as flawed as humans.
Daniel Kahneman said: “A brain is a machine for jumping to conclusions”. He meant we have developed heuristic shortcuts that might seem nonsensical to the cold, computational logic of an AI, but that have nonetheless advantaged our species across 200,000 years of evolution.
Russell argues that future AI needs to optimise towards its goals by embracing our irrationality and focusing not on the most efficient answer but on the most ‘human’ answer.
Key Takeout: Humans are nuanced, contradictory, and impulsive creatures. If an AI can observe and understand our actions through the lens of our flaws, it can serve us better. The same goes for marketers.
The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman
Mustafa Suleyman proposes that AI is not the only game in town, but one of many cross-pollinating technologies – including quantum computing, robotics, biotechnologies – that open up new opportunities and threats – from rapid cures for diseases to artificial life.
Suleyman is concerned about the combinatorial effects and bolting together of different technologies and so advocates for ‘containment’ – a collaborative globalised plan to ensure the introduction of AI into everyday life and other adjacent technologies is done slowly and under controlled conditions.
That means industrial task forces, global governance platforms, test-and-learn initiatives, worldwide education programmes, and international collaboration on mutually agreed ‘choke points’ (for instance, restricting access to chips) to stop bad actors speeding away with irresponsible development.
Key Takeout: To quote ice-hockey legend, Wayne Gretzky: “Skate where the puck is going. Not where it’s been”. We will need long-term plans for integration, contingencies, and protections. Responsible organisations should now be working behind the scenes to mitigate AI’s most potent threats. We cannot stop the river, but we can alter its course.
Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari
As with all Harari’s work, Nexus focuses on stories as the cultural and societal ‘software’ governing human progress. Throughout history, shared belief in religious narratives, monetary systems, and common values has fostered greater cohesion and collaboration.
But AI now threatens the sanctity and validity of those stories and erodes the bonds that previously bound people together. AI democratises storytelling and gifts every citizen the tools to tell their own version of the truth – whether verifiable or not.
Moreover, Harari states a lack of self-correcting mechanisms – baked into democracy via voting, or science via observation and experiment – means AI can not only distribute dangerous narratives but also preside over its own ‘robo-authored’ stories with less chance of being objectively held to account.
Key Takeout: Responsible storytelling and independently verifiable, reliable narratives will be powerful signals of legitimacy in the future. Again, truth will be a sought-after currency – and brands and businesses will not be exempt from this stricture. In our world, that could mean protocols requiring an accurate description of products and services and their providence, clear signalling of commercial partnerships, and verification for the origins of brand-related content.
AI 2041 by Kai Fu Lee
AI 2041 is a work of ‘science faction’: a collection of 12 short stories, each set in a different country or market, where AI has become integrated into every aspect of our future lives.
For instance, how we might create avatar clones of J-Pop stars for when the real-life reclusive stars are too jaded to meet fans; how rapid AI drug discoveries and robotised home deliveries may operate in new pandemics in emerging economies; how the employing of human gamers could train algorithms for autonomous vehicles in bustling mega-cities.
Every story is accompanied by a page of academic analysis, highlighting an ETA for the scenario given the current rate of progress in AI.
Key Takeout: AI’s affordability and accessibility means that AI will be a great leveller for emerging markets, and its use will reflect and amplify the local culture, values and need states on the ground. AI is not just a Western phenomenon. It is a global phenomenon – and a rising tide lifts all boats.
Novacene by James Lovelock
Written at the age of 100, James Lovelock builds further on his famous Gaia theory, stating that the Earth is a self-regulating ecosystem unconsciously optimising towards its own flourishing.
Now, with AI in ascendancy, Lovelock revisits his life’s work to conclude that we are entering the Novacene: the latest and perhaps final era in a four-billion-year timeline, where humans may change their current form as they integrate with AI.
In essence, Lovelock sees AI as our potential saviour, and postulates how, though it will inevitably overtake us in intelligence, it will still need energy and water, like humans.
Thus, it will turn its attention to solving the climate crisis for the survival of both species, before colonising the universe first, ahead of the human wave. This is a book about how AI will no longer be a distant ‘alien’ entity but will become an extended member of the human family.
Key Takeout: The future relationship between humans and machines is likely one of symbiosis. As a bookend to Stuart Russell’s thinking, only when AI is aligned with humanity’s objectives, and we both have a true understanding of each other’s needs, can union be achieved.
Preparing for the future: Implications for businesses and brands
Cutting across the work listed above are some clean takeaways for brands and businesses.
First, invest in genuinely deeper consumer knowledge. Not just more data, but richer, behavioural insight that captures the messy, human things AI must learn to interpret.
If AI needs to know us by our faults to be more effective at meeting our requirements, marketers, too, can be part of that process and learn right alongside.
Second, plan long-term. We will need to reimagine life where AI becomes Always Integrated. Like electricity, AI is a general-purpose technology and will elevate everything – from medicine to entertainment to marketing.
Furthermore, to restate: AI is not just a ‘Western’ invention and will have a dramatic, transformative effect on emerging markets, helping them level up.
Commit to a test-and-learn approach to develop skillsets, educate employees and customers alike, and prepare for an inevitable global AI integration.
Third, hardwire safeguards. Businesses and brands can lead on ethics by establishing governance systems and showcasing aspirational behaviours.
Set the agenda, don’t follow it by publishing an AI charter, appointing cross-functional governance (ethics, legal, product), and running public-facing tests that demonstrate how you protect customers.
If the scenarios above unfold, businesses will confront an era of amplified opportunity and amplified responsibility.
And that’s worth preparing for.
Phil Rowley is head of futures at Omnicom Media Group UK and author of Hit the Switch: The Future of Sustainable Business. He writes for The Media Leader about the future of media.