Personal Branding with AI: Visible Without Losing Yourself

In 2010 I was an intern doing community management for GZSZ.de, answering fan comments for a German daily soap. No career plan, no strategy deck, no thought of a personal brand. That internship turned into almost seven years at Mediengruppe RTL and, at some point, a title that had not existed before: Germany's first official social media manager. Nobody promised me that title. It emerged because I made work visible that nobody had named before.

Today I work as an AI consultant at BE BRAVE AG, advising companies on sovereign Swiss AI infrastructure, and I build products as a co-founder of ORION AI in Florida. Every week I scroll through feeds full of posts that all sound the same: neatly structured, three hashtags, zero personality. AI has made content cheap. Which is exactly why the things AI cannot deliver are gaining value: a real position, real stories, and a recognizable human behind them.

Visibility got cheap. Trust did not.

At RTL my team and I were responsible for more than 100 profiles with over 20 million fans. Back then the scarce resource was reach: whoever could broadcast had already won. Today a single person with AI produces more content in an hour than an entire editorial team used to manage in a week. The scarce resource is no longer the post. It is the reason to listen to you, of all people.

People follow people, not text modules. If your profile sounds like the summary of a language model, you are not building a relationship, you are building noise. Personal branding with AI therefore does not mean posting more. It means handing the craft to the machine and investing your own time in substance: a clear stance, lived examples, and statements you would still defend in a client meeting.

Between 2017 and 2019 I saw this from another angle at Phantasialand, a theme park that welcomes around two million visitors a year. People plan a family day there, not an impulse buy. What counted was trust: the pictures had to hold up to the actual visit. Applied to your personal brand, every post is a small promise. AI can help you formulate more promises. Keeping them is on you.

What you can safely hand over to AI

I now run more than 30 AI and digital products in production, from voice agents that answer phone calls to live translation of streams into several languages. For my own visibility I use AI every single day, but always for the craft, never for the core. Concretely, you can hand over:

Honestly calculated, this saves me most of my production time. I even release fully AI-produced music under the name DerSchiefen, so the craft demonstrably comes out of a machine. But whether anyone cares is decided by the story around it. What remains is always the part that matters: deciding what I stand for and what I actually want to say about it.

• Structuring raw material: a voice memo from the commute becomes a clean first draft.
• Deriving formats: one talk turns into posts, a newsletter section, and ideas for short videos.
• Editing and subtitles: video cuts, captions, and translations run largely automated.
• Research and angles: industry questions, trends, and fitting examples as a starting point, never the end product.
• Planning and repurposing: maintaining a content calendar and translating old pieces into new formats.

Three things you must not delegate

First, positioning: what you stand for, for whom, and why you specifically. That is a business decision, not a writing task. Second, your stories: an AI can polish anecdotes, but it cannot experience anything. Third, your opinion: a language model has none, it averages over everything ever written. And if you only publish the average, you are interchangeable.

An example from my RTL years: when we used Vidpresso to realize the first professional Facebook livestream of a Klitschko boxing match, the tool was brand new. The decision behind it was still deeply human: we believed live was going to be the next big thing, and we wanted to prove it before anyone else. What made me visible was that stance, not the software. Tools age, stances last.

My career changer story as raw material

When I stand in front of students as a guest lecturer at FH Kufstein or speak at the AllFacebook Marketing Conference, I rarely talk about frameworks. I talk about the intern answering fan comments for a daily soap. About running digital communication for a theme park. About the 360 degree agency in Cologne I led as CEO. And about the Swiss livestreaming scale-up where, as CDO, I was responsible for large productions and an app product.

The common thread through these stations was never a career plan. The common thread is this: I was always where a new medium had no rules yet, and I wrote the rules down while doing the work. First social media, then livestreaming, now AI. That is my positioning. No AI could have invented it for me, because it was already sitting in my CV. I just had to dig it out and find the nerve to tell it consistently.

This is where AI helps again, but differently than most people think. I gave a model my complete career history and asked: which patterns do you see, which stories are missing? The answers were raw material, not truth. The sorting, sharpening, and filling in of real memories I did myself. AI as a mirror works remarkably well. AI as the author of your biography does not.

Let the machine type, not speak

My advice after a decade and a half of visibility work: treat AI like the best production team you ever had. Write your positioning yourself, in three honest sentences without jargon. Collect ten stories from your own path, including the crooked ones. Formulate three opinions about your field that someone could actually disagree with. And only then let the machine build formats out of all that, as many as you like.

And if you are realizing right now that what you lack is not tools but clarity about what you actually stand for: welcome to the club, that is the real bottleneck for almost everyone. So here is my question for you: which story from your own path are you not telling yet, even though it would make your positioning obvious? Feel free to write to me, you will find the address on this page. I answer myself.