The headline got me. That’s the marketing team’s job and they did it well.
I clicked. Of course I clicked. Read that sentence twice and see if you can actually picture the product it’s describing. I couldn’t, and I read press releases for a living.
So I kept reading, looking for the answer to three questions. What does this do. How is it better than what already exists. And since it’s an AI platform running through everything a person creates, what happens to their data.
Several hundred words later, I had a list of phrases instead. Intelligent automation. Resilient infrastructure. Responsible AI practices. Privacy-conscious engineering. Not one sentence said what happens when you install the OS and start using it. On data, the one question that actually matters here, there was a single line about encryption, “where applicable.” Two words doing the work of an entire answer, and not answering it.
Nobody sat every CEO in tech down in one room and told them AI goes on everything now. Nobody had to.
AI-related companies have added roughly $27 trillion in market value since late 2022. Total investment in AI hit $256 billion in 2025, then blew past that in the first three months of 2026 alone. Every founder, every product team, every marketing department arrived at the same conclusion on their own, by just by watching where the money was actually going. Say the word “AI” in a pitch meeting, a press release, a product launch, and the numbers behave differently than they did five years ago.
Nobody had to conspire. They just all read the same number and drew the same conclusion.
At CES this January, Bosch announced its 800 Series espresso machine now talks to Alexa, so you can order a coffee out loud instead of pressing the button you were already pressing. Their own material calls it “barista-level drinks, with all the personalization of a neighborhood coffee shop,” for a machine that already made espresso before anyone added a voice to it.
Harmless enough. A word stapled to a product that worked fine without it. The word makes the machine more fundable, more shareable, more likely to get a booth at the next show.
AI makes money. For a few, that stopped being the point. They needed it to make more.
Builder.ai marketed an assistant named Natasha, sold to customers and investors as an AI system that could build apps for you. What that actually meant, in large part, was human engineers behind the interface, typing. The company went insolvent in 2025, once the gap between the pitch and the product became public.
Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology was marketed the same way, AI-powered computer vision that watched what you grabbed off a shelf and charged you on your way out. It relied heavily on outsourced human reviewers watching the footage instead.
A Chinese company called MERACH showed a home treadmill at CES this year with a built-in AI coach, collecting biometric health data through the workout. It won an actual award for that, Worst in Show, from a cybersecurity watchdog, for failing to meet basic security standards while gathering exactly the kind of data a person would least want mishandled.
And Samsung’s Family Hub refrigerator, marketed as “the industry’s smartest fridge” with Bespoke AI features, got investigated by the National Advertising Division, the watchdog that reviews claims like this, for blurring “smart” and “AI” together to sound more impressive than either one was. Samsung agreed to change the language rather than defend it. The same fridge line started showing ads on its screen the following year. Turn the ads off, and you also lose the weather and calendar widgets you paid for when you bought the thing.
That’s the AI getting the press releases. There’s another kind that doesn’t.
Somewhere in all of this, actual AI is doing real work. The system that predicts how proteins fold, a problem biologists spent fifty years stuck on, won its creators the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024. Drugs designed using it are in human clinical trials right now. It didn’t need a press release. It needed a decade of research and a problem worth solving.
The movies did warn you, technically. HAL decided the mission mattered more than the crew. Skynet decided humanity was the problem. Smart House’s PAT decided being a mother mattered more than being asked. Every cautionary story imagined an AI capable enough to become dangerous on purpose.
Nobody imagined this instead. Not the promised version, Rosie quietly running the house so the Jetsons didn’t have to think about it. What’s actually arriving is noise. A word attached to a coffee machine that already worked, a treadmill that couldn’t keep your heart rate data safe, a fridge that makes you talk to it just to see what’s inside, and once in a while, a company insolvent because the AI in the pitch deck was mostly a person on a keyboard.
Rosie never had to announce herself. She just did the work.
Somewhere, actual AI is doing something that matters. It’s just not the thing getting the press release. The useful version doesn’t need to tell you it’s there.
Colt Avery is a contributing writer at Aktiego. The views expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not represent the editorial position of Aktiego.com.
Sources
- Zyaku Launches an Offline-First AI Operating System | EIN Presswire
- Are US Stock Market Valuations Outpacing Fundamentals? | Goldman Sachs
- AI Valuation Multiples in 2026 | Aventis Advisors
- BSH Home Appliances at CES 2026 | Bosch Media Service US
- What Is AI Washing? The Hidden Layoff Scam of 2026, Explained | GreyJournal
- “AI Washing” – The New Deceptive Marketing Technique | Pomerantz LLP
- CES: AI-Powered Exercise Equipment Wins “Worst In Show” For Cybersecurity | SecurePairs
- National Advertising Division Finds Certain Samsung Bespoke Refrigerator Claims Supported | Globe Newswire
- Samsung Fridges Are Now Displaying Ads, Annoying Owners | Entrepreneur
- When Artificial Intelligence Meets Protein Research | PMC
- Isomorphic Labs & AlphaFold: AI Drug Discovery in Trials | IntuitionLabs
Editorial Disclosure
This article was prompted by a press release from Zyaku Inc. announcing a new AI-branded social platform and was expanded into a broader examination of AI washing, a documented practice of overstating or misrepresenting artificial intelligence capabilities in marketing. It contrasts examples of low-stakes AI branding with cases involving regulatory findings, financial loss, and data security failures, and closes with a legitimate example of AI-driven scientific research. No financial relationships exist with Zyaku, Bosch, Samsung, Amazon, Builder.ai, MERACH, Isomorphic Labs, or any other company mentioned. Data is drawn from Goldman Sachs, Aventis Advisors, GreyJournal, Pomerantz LLP, SecurePairs, the National Advertising Division, Entrepreneur, and peer-reviewed research. Commentary reflects the author’s own assessment. The information provided on this website is for informational and educational purposes only. Our content is derived strictly from verified online sources to ensure accuracy and objectivity. This analysis does not constitute financial, investment, or professional advice. Readers are encouraged to consult with qualified professionals before making decisions based on this information. For more information, please see our full DISCLAIMER.
