A friend on the floor in Las Vegas has been texting me photographs all week, unprompted, like dispatches. An AI grill. An AI stroller. An AI pillow that allegedly listens to you sleep. Yesterday she sent a picture of a countertop appliance whose entire sign read AI POWERED, with no indication of what it did.
I asked her. She asked the person in the booth. He said it makes toast.
Which is where we are with the label now. CES 2024 has taken a genuine technical shift and turned it into a sticker, and once a word can be applied to a stroller and a toaster and a shower head in the same aisle, the word has stopped carrying information. It has become decoration that costs nothing to apply.
A claim that every product in the category can make is not a claim, it is wallpaper, and AI became wallpaper somewhere around the second day of this show.
We have run this exact play before. Smart was the label in 2016, on refrigerators and forks and water bottles, and it meant nothing within eighteen months. Cloud was the label before that. Every time, the same sequence: real capability arrives, the label attaches to the capability, then the label detaches and floats free, and the brands that spent their whole positioning on the label are left holding a word the customer has learned to skip.
The companies that survive this cycle do the unglamorous thing, which is to describe the outcome instead of the mechanism. Nobody bought a Roomba because of the pathfinding. They bought it because the floor gets vacuumed while they are at work. Oatly never once explained the enzymatic process on the carton, and the enzymatic process is the entire product. Duolingo has been running machine learning against your forgetting curve for years and markets a green owl who is disappointed in you.
Every time, the same sequence: real capability arrives, the label attaches to the capability, then the label detaches and floats free, and the brands that spent their whole positioning on the label are left holding a word the customer has learned to skip.
So if you are writing a 2024 positioning line this month, and half the people reading this are, the question is not whether to mention AI. The question is what your product does for a person that a competitor cannot also put on a sign in a Las Vegas convention hall. If the answer is the technology itself, you do not have a position. You have a supplier.
It is raining in Portland, which it will be until roughly June, and I read the last batch of booth photos at Stumptown with a coffee that was made by a person who has been making it the same way for eleven years. No label on it. I knew exactly what it did.