Somewhere in central London right now, a PR account director is being asked to describe a handheld floor-plan scanner as artificial intelligence. Not because the scanner qualifies — it scans floor plans — but because the client has decided the company needs an AI story, and finding one is the account director’s job. The Guardian recently spoke to publicists doing exactly this kind of work: manufacturing AI angles for shoe companies, basketball hoops and laser systems, performing what one of them called “Bikram yoga-level stretches” to make ordinary products sound like they’d wandered out of a research lab. One reckoned that half the AI stories crossing their desk were ones they’d rather not send.

It’s easy to laugh at the AI-powered basketball hoop. It’s harder to notice when you’re doing the same thing to your own shopfront.

And most of us are at least a little tempted. Everyone’s homepage now says “AI-powered” something. Investors ask about your AI roadmap. A competitor half your size puts out a press release about their “proprietary AI engine” and you know full well it’s a few automations and a chatbot, but it still lands, and you still feel the tug to keep up. So the rules engine you’ve run for three years becomes “our AI-driven decisioning layer,” the email templates become “generative AI outreach,” and the shopfront gets a fresh coat of the most fashionable paint available. For a small business, though, that repaint is a bad trade. The people you’re trying to impress — buyers, customers, the good people you want to hire — are learning to discount the word faster than you can apply it.

Why the word stopped working

They’ve recalibrated because they’ve had to. When every homepage says “AI-powered,” the phrase stops carrying any information at all. It goes the way “solutions” went, and “synergy” before that — a word that once meant something and now just means the person writing it wanted to sound current. The Guardian piece captured the moment nicely: journalists’ eyes now “roll” at the word. Buyers’ eyes roll too. If your differentiator is a term that appears on every rival’s site and half the billboards on the way to work, it isn’t a differentiator. It’s camouflage, and everyone can see it.

What it costs when you get caught

The real damage, though, comes at the moment of contact — when the claim meets the reality. A prospect gets into a demo, or a trial, or just a serious conversation, and discovers that the “AI” is a spreadsheet macro and a set of if-then rules. They don’t simply mark that one claim down. They mark you down. The word was meant to signal that you’re sophisticated and ahead of the curve; getting caught stretching it signals the precise opposite — that you’ll say whatever sounds good this quarter. And now the buyer does the thing you can least afford: they start quietly wondering what else on your website is a Bikram yoga stretch.

This isn’t a hypothetical cost, either. In March 2024 the SEC brought its first “AI-washing” enforcement actions, fining two investment advisers, Delphia and Global Predictions, a combined $400,000 for overstating their use of AI; one had claimed to be the “first regulated AI financial advisor” without the technology to back it. Most small firms will never meet a regulator over this. What they’ll meet is slower and, in its way, more expensive: a customer who stops believing the rest of the pitch, and tells a few people why.

I’ve written before about AI-washing pointed inward — CEOs dressing up ordinary layoffs as bold AI-driven transformation because the narrative moves the share price. Relabelling your shopfront is the same instinct pointed the other way, outward at the market instead of inward at the workforce, and it’s spreading faster because it’s cheaper. Rewriting a homepage costs an afternoon.

The catch is that your audience is getting more literate at exactly the moment you’re getting bolder. Managers who a year ago nodded along at any AI claim can now tell capability from theatre; they know to ask which model, doing what, measured how. The gap between what you can claim and what a reasonably informed buyer will accept is closing, and it’s closing on the side of specificity. How long the discount on the word lasts, I don’t know — maybe “AI” rehabilitates itself once the genuine capability becomes ordinary and unremarkable. But right now the arrow points one way, and it’s not the flattering one.

Say the smaller, truer thing

Which points straight at what actually works now. The move that beats the rebrand is smaller, plainer language. Instead of “AI-powered platform,” say what you genuinely do:

  1. Name the thing. “We use a large language model to draft first-pass responses to support tickets.” Not “AI-enhanced customer experience.” The reader can picture the first one. The second could mean anything, which is why it reassures no one.
  2. Show the number. “It cut our average first-response time from six hours to forty minutes.” A single measured result does more for your credibility than a paragraph of adjectives, because anyone can write adjectives and almost nobody bothers to measure.
  3. Be honest about the edges. “It handles the routine 60%; the rest still comes to a human.” Naming a limitation is the most persuasive thing a marketer can do, precisely because so few do it. It tells the buyer you’re describing a real thing rather than selling them a mood.

There’s a quick test for any line before it goes on the homepage: read it with the letters “AI” deleted, and see if it still says anything. “We use a language model to draft support replies, which cut response time to forty minutes” survives the deletion — it names a concrete result that happens to involve AI. “AI-powered customer experience” collapses into nothing, because the acronym was carrying the whole sentence. The claims that collapse are exactly the ones buyers have learned to distrust.

None of that requires you to have built something extraordinary. It requires you to describe the ordinary thing you actually built, accurately. That’s a lower bar than the rebrand — and it clears the only test that matters, which is whether the claim survives the buyer looking closely.

For a business of five or fifty people, credibility is very nearly the whole asset. You don’t have the brand budget to drown out a broken promise, or the PR machine to change the subject when one gets found out. Your one real asset is a reputation that travels by word of mouth, one conversation at a time, and word of mouth punishes the caught overclaim far more efficiently than it rewards the clever one. So put the yoga mat away. Say what you actually do, in the plainest terms you can manage, and let the specificity carry the weight the buzzword never could.