AI is everywhere – and for SaaS providers, that creates a new pressure to embed the technology throughout their solutions. Marketers walk a fine line – articulating the value of their AI-enabled product to buyers without overstating or unintentionally inflating its value. And the stakes are high in this balancing act: Customers are willing to change vendors to keep up in the AI race, but losing their trust through inaccurate “AI-washing” claims can lead to dissatisfaction and customer churn.
Marketers must balance the competing pressures of keeping pace with new AI technologies – today that’s agents – and staying grounded in the real benefits of their products. Marketing and communications professionals must become more rigorous, expand their knowledge of technologies, and through this process build trust with the stakeholders concerned about the overly optimistic claims characteristic of AI-washing.
The State of AI-washing
Awareness of AI and skepticism toward overblown claims are growing in tandem and , brands face significant reputational damage if they can’t back up their statements. Gartner already reports that thousands of agentic AI vendors overstate their claims amounting to “agent washing.” A new study from MIT also added fuel to the AI-washing media narrative through its finding that 95% of enterprise AI pilots failed due to low return-on-investment.
As analysts and reporters heighten their scrutiny (and their expectations), companies must engage with these stakeholders proactively and transparently to articulate how AI tangibly plays into their technologies. The impact of failing to do so – lost public trust. In some cases, legal and regulatory scrutiny is emerging. For instance, the SEC charged two investment advisors for false or misleading “AI-washing” statements last year. More recently, even forward-looking statements have come under legal scrutiny.
And this pressure is coming for all segments of the technology market – including the highest cap companies in the world. Apple notably captured media attention for overstating AI marketing claims, as well as a lawsuit later filed by its shareholders on the topic. This drove critical media attention to Apple’s branding, one of its strongest assets. As this critical news cycle and later shareholder lawsuit demonstrates, AI-washing poses a particular risk for public companies, impacting an even wider range of stakeholders – including investors. These powerful stakeholder groups may push back against weak claims and impact the whole industry’s credibility in conversations around stewardship, standards, and even regulation.
What does this mean for marketers now? The stakeholders that shape purchasing in the B2B space – analysts, journalists, and influencers – demand clear explanation of AI claims. Businesses have an opportunity either to articulate how they stand apart from the marketing hype or run the risk of distrust among buyers.
AI-Washing Drives Third-party Skepticism
Just as third-party validation (a vital goal of communications strategy) can strengthen the reputation of and interest in a product among buyers, failing to earnestly address skepticism can have a detrimental effect. AI-washing is already driving these conversations across key B2B market influencers including analysts, business reporters, and in the candid conversations decisionmakers have with each other:
- Analysts – Analyst stakeholders are already publishing reports that highlight marketing hype and AI program failure, which drives story cycles among both traditional media and influencers. Additionally, this move into more skeptical framing changes the shape of sales conversations and analyst briefings. Instead of simply articulating the benefits of a new product or solution, marketers must be prepared to defend its value as well.
- Reporters – News cycles can play an important role in positioning issues as important for readers. And the recent news cycle around MIT’s report asserting that 95% of GenAI pilots failed provides a strong example of this. As press seek to expand their coverage of AI adoption, marketers and communicators have a strong opportunity to provide pragmatic conversations around what leads to AI value, offering balance to AI conversations in media.
- Influencers – Outside the spheres of journalism and analyst research, influencers across networks like YouTube, LinkedIn and Reddit both amplify and editorialize on topics like AI-washing. And even more than other stakeholders, influencers rely on authenticity and community trust to succeed. Like reporters, they often rely on sources like analyst reports to shape their coverage and may be open to pragmatic discourse to better illuminate issues like breaking through AI marketing hype for their audiences.
All these factors feed into more informed and more skeptical buyers. This can be good news – especially if your marketing thrives in technical discussions – however it leads to higher industry-wide expectations of proof. Buyers want to be confident in the exact AI at work in your products and how it drives real value. Marketing and communications efforts are essential to providing sales teams with the tools to meet this need.
History Rhymes: Learning From Greenwashing
This is hardly the first time that communicators and marketers have faced the pressure of public skepticism, however. To understand how to build trust among stakeholders around artificial intelligence, we can look back to greenwashing. Both these phenomena focus on the ways organizations communicate claims and commitments to their buyers, as well as the influencers who shape the conversations that matter most to them. When contributors to the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance analyzed greenwashing and the best tactics to navigate it, they highlighted the importance of clear, accurate communication; consistency between external messaging and internal activity; independent review or verification; and internal governance strategies to improve all team members’ understanding of the topic.
For AI-washing in 2025, these themes remain relevant. Companies that bring themselves in alignment with AI definitions and benchmarks can then build messages from shared understanding. In turn, marketers and communicators who pursue deeper knowledge of the AI products and services they support can better tailor messaging to the exact value of these tools, without leaning into the general claims that spark skepticism among reporters, analysts, and influencers. And through this foundation of shared knowledge and dialogue, marketers and communicators can relay vital industry knowledge to the c-suite decisionmakers driving wider AI governance conversations.
Like greenwashing, the conditions influencing AI-washing conversations are likely to change. But communication and marketing grounded in clarity and shared knowledge provides the right scaffolding to adapt as stakeholder needs and skepticism evolve.
When in Doubt, Cultivate Rigor
AI washing follows the laws of the market – buyers and the stakeholders they follow demand transparency. It’s up to the AI providers to supply it, and strong proactive communication is vital to building that awareness. Business leaders must therefore be careful stewards of their marketing messaging and guide teams towards the tangible and the provable when arguing value to buyers.
One approach is to focus on quantifiable measures of AI productivity and sophistication. Organizations can benchmark AI use – there are public benchmarks and tests that many LLM models measure against. While not perfect, these will be useful and technology communities should expand them to improve accuracy and relevance across industries. As communications professionals that work with this technology closely, we must prepare to speak authentically about AI claims and work across the c-suite to build consensus about why this matters.
Through collective commitment to a more rigorous definition – one that leans on the presence of agentic AI’s most distinct features – we can appropriately describe and market to an audience of business leaders eager to separate ROI from hot air.