We Need to Talk About AI Branding

You cannot look anywhere without seeing AI. It hasn't just taken over tech. Even old-school consumer brands are fitting, or shoving, AI somewhere into their strategy. Over the past three years, companies in every industry have rushed to integrate AI into their products and services, or at the very least to change all their messaging to say that they had.

The AI branding space is experiencing a moment of opportunity and saturation at the same time. Terms like "AI-powered," "AI copilot," and "all-in-one AI solution" have become ubiquitous and overused. While the gold rush is still just beginning, the branding landscape is already a sea of sameness that makes it hard for companies, let alone individual features, to stand apart.

Three of my former employers, Brex ("the AI-powered spend platform"), Notion ("Notion AI"), and Gusto, have all adopted AI as a meaningful part of their product value. Only two of them changed their marketing accordingly. Why is AI such a central part of some tech marketing and barely mentioned in others? What role should it play in your branding?

Just because we can doesn't mean we should

"How AI Affects Our Sense of Self," published by the Harvard Business Review, should be required reading for any marketer. After delving into the psychology of how AI affects purchasing decisions, the authors land on a sharp point: the appropriate question when considering a move to AI and automation is not "Can we?" but "Should we?"

As a brand leader and marketing advisor, I ask myself this question often, and I add a second one to it. If we do lean on AI, how can our AI branding help us differentiate and build trust?

Marketing AI features has mostly been about capturing attention. Now that AI is nothing new, it's time we focused on how it can build trust instead.

Starting from a place of low trust

AI has been memeable from the start. As it makes mistakes, tells people to put glue on pizza and eat rocks, we make light of how unknown its impact on our collective future is and how ungoverned it is compared to its rate of development.

The result of sudden ubiquity plus a lack of governance or standards is that a lot of consumers, the people you want to buy your thing, are primed to be skeptical, bored, mocking, or even irate at your attempts to fold AI into your messaging or your products. That means you are starting from a place of low trust. The stakes are high.

So how, and whether, should you brand your AI? I argue that AI branding needs to go beyond advertising the presence of artificial intelligence. It should emphasize utility and user value (what it actually does for you) and the complementary relationship between AI and human ability (how it makes the customer look good, not feel replaceable). Three ideas follow.

1. Decide when and where to call it out

Most SaaS platforms have used AI to automate some or many of their workflows. As the technology integrates into more of business and daily life, mentioning it in marketing is becoming as redundant as saying your product is "online" or "tech-enabled." Being "AI-powered" is no longer a differentiator.

Before you lead with it, ask your marketing and product teams a few questions. Will not referencing the AI-driven parts of the product misrepresent the experience in some way? Does the user actually interact with AI in-product, or is AI running behind the scenes? Can the AI make mistakes that could negatively affect customers, and do they need to know that it can?

Take Miro. Nothing in its top-level messaging gets at why the workspace being AI-powered matters to me. "Leverages AI at every stage" raises the obvious question: which stages, and how? When in doubt, you can show instead of tell. A large number of brands, Spotify among them, use the spark icon to allude to AI-powered capabilities without writing a word of copy about it. Does Spotify need to tell you Smart Shuffle is AI-powered? Can't "smart" just be the default?

Look, no one is saying "tech-powered," because it sounds dumb. AI is going to go the same way as "tech" and "online." One day, capitalizing or even using the term AI may read as a sign of dorkiness, the way capitalizing "Internet" or hyphenating "e-mail" does now.

Gusto is a good counter-example. You wouldn't know it is leveraging AI on the backend by looking at its homepage, because being AI-powered isn't what matters to the small businesses who rely on it to run payroll and pay taxes. What matters is that those things don't get messed up, that they don't get into legal trouble, and that they don't pay more than they have to. The product just needs to work, really well, and it does.

2. Use AI to make your customer look good

Many people's sense of self is rooted in their professional identity, and AI can be perceived as undermining that identity if it threatens to devalue their skills, expertise, or status. The reach of that anxiety doesn't stop at the office door. Google's "Dear Sydney" Olympics spot, later pulled, was gorgeously executed, but it is one thing to have AI outline a workout plan and another to insert it into parenting and a father-daughter moment. The backlash illustrates something crucial: as AI expands from routine tasks into emotionally charged territory, it risks intruding on the parts of identity people protect most.

When you market what AI can do, the stronger position is to show it as a complementary tool that augments human ability rather than replacing it. It doesn't take Gallup reporting that three out of four Americans believe AI will reduce jobs to recognize that people are wary. Growth will come from easing those concerns rather than playing into them.

So boil it down. Focus on how your product makes the customer look good. At work. In front of peers. To their boss. There is a reason Glossier's tagline is "You look good." We're already seeing a telling shift from "AI-powered" to "with a little help from AI." Notion is a clean example. "The AI-powered workspace" would be close to meaningless, but "Just ask Notion AI" instantly tells a user how they will interact with it, and when, and why.

3. Focus on utility over technology

AI branding doesn't really have different rules from good branding in general. Be clear about who you are for and how your product benefits them. What specific problems does your AI-backed functionality solve? What does the AI part actually do? How does it make a user's life easier or more productive?

Grammarly was founded in 2009, so it has been AI-powered far longer than the past few years. At one point it pivoted hard to ride the AI wave and marketed itself as "an AI writing assistant." Now the emphasis is back on what actually matters: helping users communicate more clearly and confidently. "Responsible AI that ensures your writing and reputation shine" is a strong line because it speaks to a writer's real concerns, sounding good and using AI ethically, and it leans on its own logomark rather than the generic sparkle.

Instacart makes the same move quietly. Its suggested search results are obviously powered by AI, but that fact doesn't matter at all to the customer browsing for ingredients or recipe ideas. It's a clean example of leading with utility instead of technology.

For companies where user-facing AI is the product, like Perplexity, Claude, or ChatGPT, both product and brand differentiation is everything, and the marketing has to emphasize a genuine specialization. For everyone else, the choice is whether to integrate AI branding seamlessly, sometimes not highlighting it at all, or to surface it as a standalone feature.

As the technology matures, branding strategy will have to adapt with it. I expect we'll move away from explicitly naming AI, much as "digital" and "smart" became implicit in most product categories. The successful AI brands of the future will focus on specific outcomes, user empowerment, and ethical considerations rather than the underlying technology itself. If you are already there, you are ahead of the pack.