A Cosmic Joke

A surprising new study has discovered that consumers are less likely to buy products that claim to use AI. This finding feels like a cosmic joke, like finding out that cardio is bad for you.

I’m sure the irony of this discovery is not lost on anyone targeted by the glut of recent AI-bedazzled marketing claims. They’re inescapable. Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so they up the ante in an endless cold war of claims and counterclaims. Consider the booths at any recent trade show. They’re a pastiche of AI callouts appliquéd onto the previous year’s signage. Going online to look at a tech vendor? Forget about it. You won’t pass the landing page without encountering a GPT-powered carnival barker.

It would be laughable, if not so sad, to think about the millions of wasted advertising dollars spent pushing what amounts to a “New Coke.” This overuse of AI as a marketing “feature” recalls the great cloud-washing embarrassment of the last decade. In that period, any company that felt behind the times on cloud migration quickly ginned up a “cloud-driven” message, even as their server-based products belied these claims. Eventually, they stopped because customers were smart enough to see through the ruse. Now, it’s happening all over again with AI. Wash, rinse, repeat. New day, same old shampoo.

More to the point for the security industry, the Washington State University (WSU) researchers found that AI claims are an even bigger turn-off for high-risk purchases. I think it’s fair to say that, at some level, all security purchases are “high-risk.” Make the wrong choice, and people can die. That’s about as risky as it gets. The takeaway is that security marketers should be even more circumspect than most in how they use the term (alongside other faddish tech affectations, for that matter).

The researchers also delved into the root cause of buyer hesitation in the face of these product claims. Simply put, the AI flex has negative impacts because it erodes emotional trust. Part of this is a still-prevalent distrust of AI, including various risks such as “loss of control and privacy, cybersecurity threats, negative emotions, the time and effort required for product and service learning.” The other part is that people don’t believe it any more than they do “new and improved” on a toothpaste label.

Of course, this is the exact opposite of what marketers hope to achieve by slathering AI frosting on their cake. The big problem for critical security products is not just that it’s a bad marketing strategy but that it displaces better approaches and the sharing of useful product information. It’s Marketing 101 that you should sell benefits, not features, because benefits are what matter to customers. But AI is not a benefit. It’s not even a feature. It’s an ingredient, at best. It’s what you do with it that counts.

Meanwhile, overhyping AI risks making customers (even more) cynical—the last thing we need for products meant to ensure life, safety, and asset protection. That’s a shame because many algorithms that have emerged under the broad AI rubric are truly useful—astounding, even—for improving how security products perform. We should all be talking about that.