Why every AI startup is starting to sound the same

Read a list of recently funded AI companies and try to remember five of them an hour later. It is harder than it should be, and the reason is not that the companies are alike. It is that the names are. A handful of conventions have taken over the category in three years, and every founder who follows one of them is spending money to sound like the competition.

The conventions

They are easy to list because they are everywhere.

• The word plus AI: a real word, often a noun from the product's field, with AI appended as a suffix or an extension. It states the category and nothing else.
• The mythological or classical borrowing: a god, a titan, a Greek or Latin root chosen for gravity. Distinctive in a room of one; indistinguishable in a room of forty.
• The verb turned noun: a plain English verb for what the product does, stripped of its object. Clean, and shared with a dozen products that do a slightly different thing.
• The lowercase single syllable with a dropped vowel: the software convention of the previous decade, still running.
• The word ending in -ly, -ify or -io: the growth era suffixes, now attached to models and agents instead of apps.

None of these is wrong. Each was distinctive once. The problem is arithmetic: a convention is a shortcut that many people find at the same time, and a name is only worth having if it belongs to one company.

Why they converge

Three reasons, and the first is the most forgivable. Naming is done fast and late, usually the week before something has to be announced, and under that pressure people reach for the pattern that recently worked. The second is that AI companies are often named by people who came from the products the names describe: engineers and researchers, who value precision and reach for the word that says what the thing is. The third is that the category itself is new enough that founders want the name to say they are in it. AI in the name is a flag. It worked when the flag was rare.

The cost is paid later and is easy to underestimate. When the category matures, the flag becomes a date stamp. Names that announced the internet in the late nineties, or mobile a decade after, tell you when the company was founded and not much else. Every current convention will do the same. The AI suffix in particular will read, in a few years, the way "dotcom" reads in a company name now.

What it costs to sound like the category

1. Recall. If a customer remembers the category and not the company, the next search sends them to whoever ranks first, which is rarely you.
2. Distinctiveness at the point of a trademark. Descriptive names are the hardest to protect, and the category word is the most descriptive word available.
3. Room to move. Most AI companies will not be AI companies in five years; they will be whatever they built. A name that says AI has to be explained away when the product becomes the point.
4. The press. A journalist writing about six companies with similar names will pick the one with the different name to lead with, because it is easier to write.

Four ways out

1. Name the outcome, not the mechanism

The mechanism is AI. The outcome is what the customer gets: fewer mistakes, faster answers, a night's sleep. Companies that name the outcome age well, because outcomes do not change when the technology does.

2. Take a word from the customer's world

Every field has its own vocabulary, and the words in it carry meaning to exactly the people you want. A name from inside the customer's world says you understand the work; a name from inside the technology says you understand the technology, which they will assume anyway.

3. Use a coined word that sounds like a company

The invented name has one great advantage in a crowded category: it is yours alone, and it never has to be explained away. The condition is that it has to sound like a word, with a rhythm the mouth already knows. Why some new names sound established on day one covers the properties that do that. The ones that fail sound like a password.

4. Let the name be short and let the tagline do the explaining

A short name plus a plain line underneath is the oldest structure there is, and it separates the two jobs the AI suffix tries to do at once. The name is for remembering. The line under it is for explaining, and the line can change every year without anyone noticing.

A test before you announce

Write your name in a list with the ten companies nearest to you. Hand the list to somebody outside the field and ask them to pick the one that is not an AI company. If they pick yours, good; that is the one they will remember. If they cannot pick any, you have joined the category rather than entered it.

Names for an AI company that does not want AI in the name

The names on Webba in this territory were chosen because they sound like companies first and technology second. The software and developer tools collection holds most of them, and a few sit outside it.

Software & developer toolsWhere most of the technical names live.