AI Washing: The Corporate Scramble to Rebrand Ordinary Tech as Artificial Intelligence

UK and US firms are increasingly engaging in 'AI washing' by rebranding standard automation as artificial intelligence to attract investor interest. PR executives report being pressured to make extreme stretches to present low-tech products as AI-driven, leading to widespread media cynicism. This trend highlights a growing gap between genuine technological innovation and opportunistic marketing hype.

Key Points

• Companies are increasingly 'AI washing' by rebranding old automation technologies as artificial intelligence to exploit current tech trends.
• PR professionals express frustration over being forced to send misleading pitches, noting that journalists are becoming cynical and numb to AI-driven marketing language.
• Examples of tenuous AI claims include AI-powered basketball hoops, safety lasers, and handheld property scanners that are actually just basic automation.
• The trend is driven by a desire to appear relevant to investors and capitalize on the stock market's resilience during the AI boom.
• This rebranding effort often occurs alongside significant workforce reductions as firms attempt to align their image with AI-driven efficiency.

Sentiment

The overall sentiment is strongly aligned with the article's skepticism toward AI washing. Most commenters treat corporate AI rebranding as cynical, embarrassing, or bubble-like, while reserving some space for genuine AI use cases. The thread becomes more divided when it broadens from marketing abuse to the larger question of whether AI investment, job displacement fears, and social backlash are justified.

In Agreement

• Calling ordinary automation AI makes companies look as if they lack a real value proposition, because the technology label does not explain what user problem is solved.
• Investor incentives reward trend-aligned language, so companies relabel themselves to fit AI portfolios, indexes, acquisition narratives, or speculative market demand.
• The pattern resembles earlier branding bubbles around cloud, big data, blockchain, NFTs, and dot-com naming, where ordinary businesses adopted fashionable labels to attract capital.
• Consumer backlash may turn AI branding into a liability, especially when users associate it with job loss, environmental cost, privacy risk, creative appropriation, or degraded products.
• Workplace anecdotes and pitch-deck examples show basic search, automation, CRUD work, and consultant positioning being rebranded as AI with little substantive change.
• The Allbirds case is viewed by many as a financial or stock-market maneuver that illustrates how hype can overwhelm fundamentals.

Opposed

• Some commenters argue that AI adoption is genuinely useful and that more companies will become meaningfully AI-driven, so dismissing the whole wave as another crypto-style grift is naive.
• A few participants say investors and buyers often understand the distinction between real AI and weak marketing, and that capital moving toward AI companies can be rational.
• Some defend feature-oriented startups or acquisition-driven strategies as legitimate business models rather than inherently fraudulent hype plays.
• Several commenters distinguish between bad AI marketing and the underlying technology, saying AI already changes their work and can be valuable when guided by knowledgeable users.
• One line of pushback says the article may overread some examples, because not every company using AI language is necessarily deceiving the market.