By Hal Crawford
Publication Date: 2026-02-05 05:47:00
The AI category has been a branding desert for three years. Every company looks the same, sounds the same, and changes so frequently that even they have lost track of what they are selling.
OpenAI becomes ChatGPT, becomes GPT-4, becomes Canvas, becomes what Sam Altman dreamed up last Tuesday. Google kills Bard, resurrects him as Gemini, and then pretends nothing happened. Anthropic releases Claude 3, then 3.5, and then sprinkles in Opus and Sonnet variants like a sommelier who can’t commit to one grape.
Ask any civilian what AI tool they use and you’ll get a blank stare. There’s nothing wrong with being confused. If every company offers chat, analytics, coding, and image generation on strikingly similar platforms, differentiation becomes impossible. There are too many billion-dollar players hemorrhaging too much mega-money for this genericism to be sustainable.
But finally the first shards of real differentiation are emerging. And here lies the delicious irony: it happens…
