UK communications agencies are quietly losing patience with clients who insist on being repositioned as artificial intelligence companies, no matter how thin the connection. According to Hacker News, which surfaced a report on the practice, publicists describe “Bikram yoga-level stretches” by brands trying to manufacture reasons to talk about AI. The phenomenon now has a name: AI washing.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who lived through the dot-com era, the blockchain wave, or the “cloud-enabled” frenzy of the early 2010s. A buzzword catches fire, valuations follow, and suddenly every company discovers it was secretly working on the thing all along. This is significant because the cycle is compressing. Generative AI went from research curiosity to mandatory press release in under three years.
What PR folks are actually seeing
The complaints in the report are specific and damning:
- A shoe company, AllBirds, reportedly “pivoted” to acquiring AI graphics processing units.
- Genetics firms are hyping AI-powered blood tests.
- Press releases have promoted AI-powered basketball hoops and AI-powered lasers that supposedly protect women on subway platforms.
- A property company tried to pitch a handheld floor-plan scanner as AI, when the underlying tech is mostly automation.
One account director estimated roughly half of the AI-tagged pitches he sends out, he wishes he didn’t. Another publicist said you can “almost hear the eyes roll” when reporters get the word AI in a subject line. Imran Ariff of Fight or Flight put it more diplomatically: brands “drink their own Kool-Aid” and overshoot.
Why it matters now
Two things are happening at once. First, real AI investment is enormous, and CEOs face pressure from boards and investors to demonstrate they’re participating. Second, regulators are starting to notice. The US SEC has already brought AI washing enforcement cases against firms that overstated their machine learning capabilities to investors. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority and the FTC in the States have both signaled they’re watching marketing claims.
There’s also a credibility tax. When every product is “AI-powered,” the label loses meaning. The PR pros quoted in the piece say journalists have gone numb. That numbness eventually reaches customers, and then procurement teams, and then the genuine AI vendors who actually need the distinction to win deals.
Meanwhile, the human cost of the hype is getting harder to ignore. Standard Chartered’s chief executive apologized last week for describing workers facing AI-driven job cuts as “lower-value human capital.” The same companies racing to slap AI on their press releases are using the technology to justify layoffs, which makes the marketing posture even more fraught.
Practical takeaways
For operators trying to talk about AI without becoming a punchline:
- Name the actual technique. Say retrieval-augmented generation, computer vision, or predictive modeling. Specificity reads as competence. Vagueness reads as marketing.
- Show the delta. What does the AI version do that the previous automation didn’t? If you can’t answer that in one sentence, you don’t have an AI product, you have a press release.
- Skip the commentary plays. Releasing a chatbot doesn’t qualify your CEO to comment on sovereign AI funds. Reporters know the difference.
- Watch the legal exposure. Public companies face securities risk for overstating AI capabilities. Private companies face customer churn when the product doesn’t match the pitch.
The broader signal here is that we’re entering the disillusionment phase of the AI cycle, at least at the messaging layer. Stock markets have shrugged off recent jitters, but the gap between what’s marketed and what’s delivered is widening. That gap is where the next correction tends to start.
For more details on specific examples and the full PR industry pushback, the original reporting is worth a read.