'With AI' is the new 'Gluten-Free'

The first time I saw “gluten-free” stamped on a bottle of spring water, I realized marketing had quietly reinvented absolution. You didn’t even have to change the product; you only had to change how the buyer felt about themselves while buying it. A decade later, the same magic sticker has been upgraded to two letters. “With AI” is how everyday objects—and every software release—confess they’re modern without revealing exactly how. It’s a benediction and a bargain: forgive our sameness; crown us with tomorrow.

When Desire Became Virtue

If “sex sells” taught marketers that desire is portable, “with AI” teaches them that virtue is, too. Desire moved cars and shampoo. Virtue moves budget meetings. It promises you’re the kind of leader who brings the future to the table, even if what you’ve brought is yesterday’s feature with a new photo filter. The genius isn’t deception; it’s dietetics. “With AI” works like a stabilizer in processed food: it keeps the brand story glossy, prevents separation, and rescues the mouthfeel when the recipe runs thin.

The spoon stands up straighter. The demo tastes smoother. The buyer swallows happily.

Walk with me through a product kickoff. The brief is not “build something miraculous”; the brief is “win the next quarter.” The room knows that parity is death, but wholesale reinvention is expensive and late. So the team reaches for the additive. The designer drifts toward tasteful neon gradients. The copy shifts from verbs about doing to verbs about becoming.

“Create” becomes “co-create.” “Search” becomes “discover.” “Schedule” becomes “prioritize.”

You can feel the mood change when the word “AI” enters the slide. The feature hasn’t improved yet, but the expectation has, which in commerce is half the battle and in storytelling is the whole war.

The Sticker That Closes the Sale

The sales deck learns the choreography faster than the product learns anything. First meeting: sparkle and stickers. Second meeting: numbers and nouns. In the first act, “with AI” is the key that opens the calendar. It compresses aspiration into a headline: modern, efficient, future-proof. Procurement looks at the price and inhales sharply; the VP of Whatever nods and says the words that release oxygen back into the space: “There’s AI in there.” Suddenly, the premium feels like a small payment for joining the parade. Herd risk becomes herd insurance. If things go sideways later, at least we bought the thing everyone else bought.

The sticker comes with plausible deniability.

It would be easy to mock this if it weren’t also useful. Buyers are not dumb; they are busy. They swim in a sea of sameness, haunted by the mess in their data, the impatience of their teams, and the boss who wants the plan to be visionary but the rollout to be invisible. “With AI” is a sorting mechanism. It tells them which vendors claim to be pointed at tomorrow. The trick, for both sides, is to turn the label into a map instead of a mask. When “with AI” just means “we added adjectives,” it burns trust. When it means “we made thoughtful choices about where intelligence lives and what it does for you on a Tuesday,” it earns a signature.

Turning Confetti Into a Menu

This is where marketing earns its keep. The lazy version of “with AI” is confetti. The disciplined version is a menu. You don’t need to show your recipe; you do need to say which dish is spicier, which one is vegan, and why the chef added lemon zest. In practice, that means telling the buyer what the intelligence changes for them, not for your brand narrative. If the inbox gets quieter, say how. If the hand-offs shrink, say where. If the error rate drops in the one mess that ruins everyone’s Friday, say which mess.

The sticker should start the conversation; the specifics should finish it.

There’s a pricing lesson hiding inside the label, and it’s not the one you think. In the first year of the sticker craze, you could add two letters and twenty percent. That window is closing. Commoditization is unforgiving, and the internet has taught your audience to see the same trick repeated across twenty landing pages before breakfast. The way to keep the margin now is specificity. “With AI” as a headline earns you a click; “fewer false positives in claims adjudication, measured at client X over Y months” earns you a budget code. The romance brings them to the table. The receipts let them stay.

Marketing With a Wink, Not a Blindfold

If you’re a CMO, you already feel the pressure to put “AI” on everything from the hero product to the broom closet. Resist the bland version of the future. Make the sticker work for you by making it honest, precise, and funny. Buyers are fluent in romance; what surprises them now is candor. Tell them what your model actually helps with and why it’s the right size; show them the boundary between on-device magic and big-brain-in-the-cloud without mumbling. If you have a delightful limitation, don’t hide it; name it with a wink and a workaround. You’ll disarm the cynics faster than any gradient can.

If you’re a CRO, turn the label into a sequence, not a slogan. In first meetings, let “with AI” do what it does best: reduce anxiety and widen the imagination. In the second meeting, bring the bad Wi-Fi story and the Tuesday use case. Show your champion how to sell this up and sideways. Provide them with a concise sentence for Legal and a straightforward sentence for Finance. Equip them with a little theater, but make it the kind that survives daylight. The best sellers I know don’t fear the moment the room asks, “Where does it run?” They love it, because that’s the moment the buyer discovers you’re not selling perfume—you’re selling plumbing.

The New Aesthetic of Intelligence

In the creative department, the aesthetics of “with AI” are evolving, and thank goodness. Early on, it was a rave: neon wireframes, chrome robots, vaporwave grids. The new visual language is calmer. It looks more like a kitchen renovation than a space launch. Clean counters, quiet light, a small whisper of science in the corner. This is the right move. Most customers are not buying ambition; they’re buying relief. The art should say, “We made your pile of chores feel like a finished room.” That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun. By all means, keep the wink.

Just make sure the wink is about the buyer’s life, not your brand’s reflection in the toaster.

There’s an ethical layer to this that isn’t a buzzkill; it’s a competitive advantage. Audiences have been burned by puppet demos and breathless claims. They are primed, in the archaeological sense, to doubt. The brand that says “with AI” and then explains what that means in human terms—what changes, what doesn’t, what fails gracefully—will pull ahead because credibility compounds. In an age where everyone sounds like the future, the grown-up in the room wins by sounding like Wednesday. It’s shockingly attractive.

The Additive and the Appetite

The “stabilizer” metaphor won’t leave me alone, because it captures the temptation and the trap. Stabilizers are marvelous in the right dose; they keep a product consistent across time and temperature. However, too much stabilizer can cause you to forget what food tastes like.

“With AI” should bind your story, not replace it.

If you’re shipping the same cereal as your competitors, the label won’t save you. If you’ve actually made Tuesday better and can say how, the label will amplify the change and give your audience the language to brag about themselves for choosing you. That, in the end, is the real cargo of the sticker: it isn’t just self-flattery for the brand; it’s social proof for the buyer.

I’ll leave you with two scenes I see every week. In the first, a founder glows through a demo, surfing on the phrase “with AI” the way a driver’s-ed student grips a steering wheel. The room nods, the sticker sparkles, and then the questions start, and the answers go gaseous. The meeting ends politely, the champion never calls back, and everyone says the market is tough. In the second, a product lead opens with a line that makes the room smile—“We took the most hated thirty minutes of your Tuesday and made them twelve”—and then walks, calmly, through how. They name one thing the model is great at and one thing it refuses to do. They point to a boundary and offer a plan B for when the network coughs. When they finally say “with AI,” it lands like punctuation. The order arrives two weeks later with a note that says, “Our team felt seen.”

The Smile That Sticks

That’s the game now. “Sex sells” dazzled the senses; “with AI” soothes the board. Both work until everyone smells the same. The brands that break away from here won’t be the ones that shout the label loudest. They’ll be the ones that make you grin, then nod, then sign, because the promise is deliciously specific, the tradeoffs are in plain view, and the product does what it said to the one day of the week you needed it most. Keep the sticker. It’s charming. But let the substance be the reason the smile sticks.