The Rebrand-to-AI Playbook Is Getting Embarrassing for Everyone Watching

March 9, 2026

I want to talk about something that has been bothering me since at least mid-2023, and that I have absolutely no financial stake in saying, which I'm told makes it more credible. Companies - real ones, with investors and press releases and LinkedIn pages that get lots of congratulatory comments - are rebranding themselves as AI companies. Not because they built AI. Not because their product changed. But because the word helps. And I find it genuinely mortifying to watch.

Let me be precise about what I mean. I'm not talking about Adobe adding generative AI to Photoshop, or Google folding AI into search results. Those are actual product decisions backed by actual engineering. I'm talking about the other thing - the playbook where a struggling or mediocre company looks at the market, sees a word that moves stock prices, and attaches that word to itself like a price tag on a handbag that doesn't belong to you. I've seen it. You've seen it. We've all been sitting in the same waiting room watching this happen and pretending to read a magazine.

We Have Seen This Movie Before

The history here is not subtle. A fun thing about the dot-com and crypto booms was how companies with no previous connection to dot-com or crypto added those terms to their names and watched their stock prices soar. Perhaps the greatest example is Long Island Ice Tea Corp. rebranding as Long Blockchain Corp. in 2017 with a promise to shift from making iced tea to making crypto - which resulted in a 289% rally, years of investigations, and no crypto.

That is the template. That is the whole thing. And yet here we are in 2025 watching people run it again with a different word on the front. The AI version of this is playing out right now, except now instead of adding ".com" they are adding "AI-powered" to their taglines and "AI" to their investor decks and, in some cases, restructuring their entire public identity around a technology they are, at best, using incidentally.

Almost every company either has plans to incorporate AI, is actively using it, or is rebranding its old rule-based engines as AI-enabled technologies. That last category is the one that gets me. Relabeling a rules-based decision tree as "AI" isn't a product update. It's a costume.

Baroque oil painting of a luxurious still life with silk handbag, pearls, gold coins and goblet on a dark table, with a hand emerging from shadow to tie a plain paper tag onto the handbag with twine, dramatic Rembrandt-style candlelight — Wanted to see what it looked like when you put a tag on something that wasn't yours. Showed it to Chris and he said it was a little on the nose. He's probably right.

The Numbers That Made This Happen

I understand why companies do it. The financial incentive was, for a while, extremely real. The number of AI mentions in Q2 2023 reached an all-time high of 7,358, an increase of 366% compared to Q1 2023. Companies that mentioned AI saw an average stock price increase of 4.6%, while those who did not only saw a 2.4% increase. Tory mentioned something about "following the data" once when he was going through his thing with the car, and honestly he was right about that part at least - the data was very clear. Say AI, price goes up.

Among technology companies mentioning AI, 71% experienced stock price increases. On average, they rose by 11.9%. Eleven point nine percent is not a rounding error. That is a real number that real finance people in real board meetings were looking at and translating into very straightforward instructions for their communications teams.

And so the communications teams did their job. The rebrand decks were built. The new taglines were written. "AI" became the number one most annoying business buzzword of 2024. With ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and others integrating into everyday lives, the word became overused and hyped up, saturated in the media, with companies jumping on the bandwagon to make their product or service stand out - leaving a lot of noise, a lot of inflated promises, and fatigue.

That's the part I want to linger on: the fatigue. Because it's not just annoying. It's actually damaging something.

What Gets Broken When Everyone Claims the Same Word

We are now in a market where "AI" has started to lose some of its meaning. Using "AI" as a catch-all term fails to capture its potential. That's not a complaint about language. That's a market failure in slow motion. When every product claims to be AI-powered, buyers can no longer use that claim as signal. It becomes noise. And the companies that are actually building serious AI infrastructure - the ones doing the real engineering, making real product bets - get washed out in the same visual frequency as whoever just added "AI" to their homepage hero section.

I had someone from the office set up a platform for me a while back - something we were evaluating for outreach and contact data, one of those email finder tools the team had been looking at. She was there most of the afternoon getting it configured. The product had "AI-powered" in about six places on its interface. When I actually used it, I couldn't tell you what the AI was doing versus what any normal lookup tool would do. I asked Chris about it and he gave me this look - that very patient, very sweet look he gives when he's trying to find something charitable to say - and he just said "yeah, most of them say that now."

"AI has been used as a buzzword to drive share price premiums, but companies have not always demonstrated usage of cutting-edge techniques. In the private markets, we are seeing hundreds of millions of dollars flow into 'AI' companies that have no product market fit." That's from a venture capital analyst. Not a frustrated blogger. An actual investor, watching actual money move toward actual nothing.

And the workers inside these companies aren't faring better either. Despite AI adoption surging to 70% in 2025 from 52% in 2024, workers are also facing higher levels of digital burnout. Digital exhaustion increased to 84% in 2025 from 75% the prior year, while unmanageable workloads also rose to 77%. So we have companies rebranding around AI while simultaneously creating conditions where the humans interacting with these tools are running hotter and more exhausted than before. Great pivot. Very strategic.

The Specific Case That Set Me Off

The crypto-to-AI handoff is particularly striking because it happened so visibly and so fast. HIVE Blockchain announced its strategic rebranding to HIVE Digital Technologies, wanting to remain a leader in the blockchain sector while focusing on AI. Their revenue had dropped 50% in the prior fiscal year. The move aimed to show the company's evolving expansion into high-performance computing data centers and the trend of mass adoption of Artificial Intelligence. They weren't the only one. One of the biggest publicly traded bitcoin mining firms announced it was swapping the "Blockchain" out of its name for "Platforms" - the rebranding to Riot Platforms was to "underpin" an "increasingly diversified business."

So blockchain didn't work out. Now it's AI. Same playbook. Same press release structure. Same vague promises about high-performance computing. The thing I keep thinking about is how the investors who got burned on the blockchain version of this are now, apparently, willing to fund the AI version. I asked Derek about it and he made some comment about how this is exactly what happened with the Star Wars franchise - repackaging the same story with new branding and hoping nobody notices. He's wrong about the original trilogy obviously, but the analogy is actually fine.

Check out our piece on the software stock instability nobody wants to name out loud - because some of the companies getting hit hardest are exactly the ones whose valuations were inflated by AI positioning that the market is now pressure-testing.

The Difference Between Using AI and Being AI

Here is the distinction I think matters and that almost nobody in these announcements bothers to make: there is a difference between a company that uses AI as part of its operations and a company whose core value proposition is built on AI capability. The former is basically every company now, or will be. The latter is a specific, expensive, defensible thing that requires real investment and real talent to maintain.

The term "Artificial Intelligence" has become a buzzword many companies are eager to apply to their products and services. However, using AI as a blanket term without substance can be not only misleading but also damaging to the industry's credibility.

I was at lunch with Linda last Tuesday - she'd been telling Gerald about all of this, apparently, and he had some comment about it that she was passing along - and she made a point I think is worth repeating: "If everyone's AI, then nobody's AI." Linda has been saying smart things for 31 years of marriage and apparently it's still working for her.

The companies that are genuinely building AI capability don't tend to need to scream about it. Nvidia doesn't have a press release explaining that they do AI now. They have GPUs that the entire industry runs on. Nvidia has become the backbone of the AI revolution. Its graphics processing units are the industry standard for training and running large language models, making the company one of the earliest and biggest beneficiaries of generative AI. Once known primarily for gaming chips, Nvidia now supplies the core hardware for data centers worldwide. That's what actual transformation looks like. It takes years and it shows up in the architecture, not the tagline.

We actually wrote about what AI agents are really doing inside software right now - what AI agents are actually doing in your software - and the gap between what vendors say and what's actually running under the hood is sometimes staggering. That piece hurt to write a little.

The People Running Businesses Are Smart Enough to Notice

Here's what I think is actually happening, and why I think the rebrand playbook is getting not just embarrassing but actively counterproductive: buyers have started to catch up.

In 2025, agentic AI was perhaps the most celebrated topic in tech communities. Organizations lined up to embed autonomous agents in their everyday processes, even tried to force-fit where there was absolutely no need. The ideas were conceptualized around agentic AI, proof of concept happened - and then "death by PoC." Projects were not scaled to production. That failure pattern is now common enough that procurement teams and operations leads have lived through it. They approved the vendor. They got the demo. They saw the "AI-powered" dashboard. And then nothing changed in their actual workflow except the subscription line on their credit card statement.

The trust deficit that creates is real, and it compounds. When a company says "AI-powered" now, a non-trivial percentage of the room is quietly thinking: "Is it though?" That question used to be impolite to ask. It's now standard diligence. And if you're one of the companies that used "AI" as a costume rather than a capability, that question is going to be a problem for you at renewal time.

We've also written about something related - the moment executives started publicly admitting their AI dependency and what that means once you've staked your brand identity on a technology you don't fully control. Some of those companies are now very quietly trying to reframe what they said two years ago, which is its own genre of communications disaster.

So Who Actually Gets to Call Themselves AI?

I'm not going to draw a regulatory line here because I'm not a regulator and also because I genuinely don't think regulators would help. What I think would help is buyers asking more specific questions and vendors being required to answer them with something more concrete than a badge on their homepage.

Jamie - and I know nobody calls him that, he knows nobody calls him that - forwarded an article to the team last month about a company that had just rebranded around AI and raised a new round. Tory, who is somehow still relentlessly optimistic about everything despite his current circumstances, was genuinely excited about it. I looked at the product and I couldn't find the AI. Like, I went looking and it wasn't there. There was a chatbot in the corner that clearly ran on something off-the-shelf. That was the AI.

The whole AI-in-the-name premium that drove the rebrand wave is already losing pressure. The rapid growth of artificial intelligence, coupled with high performance expectations for the sector, means that the price performance of AI stocks may be volatile. The "hot money" has been chasing the AI market since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, so a lot of future growth may already be priced into these stocks. That same dynamic applies to private companies and product positioning. When the premium for the label compresses - and it is compressing - the companies that only had the label are going to find themselves explaining what they actually do.

The answer better not be "we make Arnold Palmers."

If you're evaluating vendors right now - any vendor, in any category - look at whether their AI claims show up in the product behavior or only in the marketing copy. Ask them what the AI actually does in two sentences. If they use the words "intelligent," "dynamic," or "seamless" without finishing the thought, that's your answer. You can also look at what we've found doing actual stack stress tests the way a lender would - it's a useful frame for separating what software actually does from what it claims to do.

My European travel agent - I have one specifically for Europe, it just makes things easier - once told me that the worst thing a restaurant can do is have a menu that's too long. It means they're not actually good at any of it. I think about that a lot when I see a B2B software homepage with seventeen AI badges on it. Pick something. Be good at it. Stop putting "AI" in your name because the word was profitable for six quarters and you needed a new narrative.

The rebrand-to-AI playbook had a window. That window is closing. And the companies running it right now are going to spend the next two years explaining to customers why the AI they promised isn't in the product they delivered. That's not a branding problem. That's a trust problem. And there is no rebrand for that.