In a few short years, right before our eyes, the generative AI and LLM category has started to take shape. As brand builders, Verve has been watching closely.
When a new category emerges, so do its signifiers: the visual cues, the effective messaging models, and communicative patterns that define how AI brands tend to look and feel. Recently, we’ve seen a widely-discussed brand refresh for OpenAI, and every week there are new models, features and promising startups launching in this nascent brand space. Yet, there’s still no clear dominant leader. That spot remains up for grabs.
To date, most brands in AI are clinical, hyper-technical, and can often feel like just another Apple-esque clone. But history tells us that the strongest brands build an emotional connection with their users. Personality matters, distinction matters.
Amid all this discourse, we asked three of Verve’s deep thinkers—Eveline, Walewijn and Sarah—one big question: How can we define an AI brand while the category is still evolving?
Eveline Koppejan,
Brand Strategy Lead
For a radical new technology to break through the noise and get adopted by the masses, it needs a high rate of acceptance and adoption. This comes from recognizability and rooting the technology in things we already know and care about.
If you encounter something you haven’t seen before, your brain likes to take a shortcut and place it in a category it's already familiar with. That’s because your brain is wired to be efficient.
So, it helps to position a new technology within a category that people already know and understand. From a brand strategy perspective, the lowest hanging fruit would be to frame a new offering as the “Uber of e-commerce” or the “Swiss knife of AI”. Of course, another easy way to define a category is to give it features and characteristics that are widely accepted or loved.
Think of the first generation iMacs: friendly eggs in translucent, bubblegum shells that reveal the technology underneath and help to make it all a little less intimidating.
Faculty’s Frontier brand is defined by its engraved Roman typeface and grainy study of texture. OpenAI’s visual cues come from typewritten poetry, landscapes and the setting sun. There’s nothing otherworldly or overly technical about it. It’s about life. Living. And the beauty of it.
These recent rebrands are rewriting how our brains are wired. It also roots AI in real life and doesn’t place it outside of life, or makes it look larger than life.
We see multiple brands attempting to define this dominant design – a term coined by Utterback and Abernathy back in 1975 that is pressing for the AI category today. The dominant design indicates key technological features that become a de facto standard. Think of the QWERTY keyboard. Or the fact that every car has four wheels (and a heart), pedals, and mirrors for safety. When cars were still novel, all of that was undefined.
For AI and LLMs it’s probably going to result in products defined by their conversational interface, a clean look and feel (yes, thanks to Apple), and plenty of references to the real world we all share.
Walewijn den Boer,
Creative Director
First things first: AI brands need to know their market. This space is rife with controversy. OpenAI is in Microsoft's pocket, Anthropic is funded by Bezos and Grok is basically a misinformation and censorship machine for Musk. Most of the big players in this space are led by Big American Tech, falling over each other for technical and marketing dominance. For brand experts, another question might be: do you want to be associated with that hot mess at all?
Entering the LLM arms race now is futile, but the market for smaller AI models with narrow sets of tasks is where opportunities still feel limitless. AI agents and hyperfocused models are on the rise.
Take Replit, which empowers someone with zero coding experience to code apps from scratch. Individual consumers can see the value of these products from the jump.
Branding in the AI space has already matured quite a lot. At first it was all about gradients, glows and sparkly imagery. Then there was a dramatic split between OpenAI and Anthropic. With OpenAI feeling minimalistic and pragmatic with its “laboratory” feel, Anthropic went the other way. It was founded by OpenAI dissidents, disgruntled with the company’s ethical practices and lack of safety checks and measures. So Anthropic went branded in the exact opposite direction: a warm, tactile aesthetic that uses earth tones and illustrations.
Both these aesthetics are, by extension, marketing AI technology as a whole. But, for many, the hype is already over: we get the extremes of AI, it has been accepted by the public. Now the questions our brands should answer are meatier: ”How can AI help me. What’s in it for me, in my everyday life, in my work, how will it let me achieve my ambitions? What will be my Gutenburg moment?” I want design that feels tangible and messaging that is easy to explain.
I’m waiting for an AI brand that can get me emotionally involved.
The most fundamental elements of branding are yet to be embraced by the AI space. Questions like “why should I care?” and “what should I feel?” are cast aside. As the brand category continues to mature, technical differentiators will matter less and less, and the emotional ones will matter more and more. I miss the real emotional engagement, the ”Just do it”that makes me understand and love the brand straight away—specs be damned.
Sarah de Jager,
Digital Design Lead
Designers are key players in the race for leadership in the AI and LLM landscape because we design the space where humans and technology meet. In a world of-rapidly evolving technology, a brand’s power lies in building trust and adaptability—ensuring people feel confident embracing what comes next.
I’ve been guilty of over-romanticizing, LLMs and AI ever since watching Her in 2013. Unlike most sci-fi films that lean into dystopian robot takeovers (which to be fair, I also love), Her presented a more intimate, relatable love story with an operating system of the not-too-distant future. Its deliberate ordinariness, along with Scarlett Johansson’s whispery voice, and the film’s warm, soft hues left a lasting impression.
Human-feeling brands like Claude and OpenAI’s recent brand refresh feel like a step in the right direction—an invitational move that makes AI technology feel more approachable and trustworthy.
So what’s next? The new generation of AI will be deeply personal, escaping the uncanny valley and seamless in our daily lives.
Imagine sending your digital duplicate to work. That sounds better than the creepy Severance concept splitting your mind between two lives: one in the outside world, and one trapped in the office. But AI Agents will handle your phone, manage your prompts, and, basically do all the stuff you’d rather ignore. Technology will start to feel less like a tool and more like your digital twin.
I believe LLMs and AI will eventually reach a point where they become invisible—shifting from multiple interfaces to a single, seamless experience that blends effortlessly into our lives. Ultimately, technology will be so intuitive and integrated that we won’t even notice it. As Mark Weiser, often called the father of ubiquitous computing (IoT), famously said, “A good tool is an invisible tool.”
So, what does this mean for the brand?
For any emerging AI brand to stand the test of time, it must be highly adaptable, deeply personal, and almost magically invisible—blending into people’s lives while evolving with them.
