Why every AI company sounds identical.

There is a game I play at work. Take a group of AI vendor homepages, cover the logos, match each company to its own copy. I lose every time, and not because the products are similar. A contract review tool and a sales forecasting engine touch different data, sit with different teams, fail in different ways. Both will tell me they use agentic AI to seamlessly integrate with my existing stack.

If the same paragraph can describe unrelated products, it is describing neither.

This is not laziness. I have watched this copy get made, and the emptiness is the output of great care. A young category gets its vocabulary from analysts and investors, not buyers, so the homepage is written to be legible to the quadrant and the next funding round. Precision feels dangerous, because describing exactly what you do also describes what you don't, and vague words are option value. Then review does the rest. Legal cuts the number, sales adds "enterprise-grade," the founder swaps in their investor's verb. What survives is the sentence nobody could object to, which is the sentence nobody remembers.

A partial glossary

agentic

it retries when it fails.

copilot

autocomplete, plus a brand team.

enterprise-grade

we have SSO and a SOC 2 report, please stop asking.

human in the loop

wrong often enough that we need you to check.

seamless integration

there is an API, and a solutions engineer whose whole job exists because of what "seamless" is covering for.

trusted by leading enterprises

a few logos cleared legal.

One apology

I wrote these sentences for years, at AI startups, from zero. I have personally shipped "seamlessly orchestrate omnichannel engagement." Every word was locally defensible. The sentence, taken whole, told the reader nothing that countless other companies weren't also telling them. There is a specific small shrug you feel when a line will pass review and say nothing, and I got very good at ignoring it. Sorry. You deserved a sentence with content in it.

The punishment fits the crime: I now sit on the buyer's side, inside a large bank, reading this language for a living. What we need to know is boring. What it does, what data it touches, what happens when it's wrong. The website answers none of it, so every claim gets re-litigated in calls and security questionnaires, and the copy that was supposed to open the door is why the door takes months. The most useful vendor document I ever received was a short architecture diagram with caveats written by an engineer, visibly unreviewed by marketing. I understood the product quickly.

A modest proposal

A strict category-word budget, spent wherever the words earn their keep. Everything else must pass a test: could this sentence be false?

"Substantially reduces contract review time for a mid-market legal team" could be false. Someone could check, which is exactly why it means something. "Unlocks productivity across the enterprise" cannot be false, so it means nothing.

And say what your product does not do, in public. The vendor willing to state a boundary is presumed honest about everything inside it.

A company in this category that sounds like a person will be mistaken for the leader. The position is still open.