What it is

AI washing is when companies slap "AI-powered" on their products or services without any meaningful artificial intelligence behind them. It's greenwashing's tech cousin. That "AI-driven" analytics tool? Might just be a spreadsheet with some IF statements. The "intelligent" chatbot on that website? Could well be a decision tree written in 2019.

It's everywhere right now because investors and customers get excited about AI, so companies have a massive incentive to sprinkle the term over everything. The SEC in the US has actually started fining companies for it. A product that used to be called "automated" is now "AI-powered." A basic recommendation engine becomes "machine learning." A search bar gets rebranded as "AI-assisted discovery." Most of the time, the underlying technology hasn't changed — just the marketing.

Why it matters for your job

This matters for two reasons. First, if your company is AI washing, it creates a false sense of urgency. You might panic about being replaced by technology that doesn't actually exist yet. I've spoken to people terrified about an "AI transformation" at their company that turned out to be someone buying a Zapier subscription.

Second, if you're evaluating tools to use in your own work, AI washing makes it genuinely hard to tell what's useful and what's rubbish. You might waste weeks learning a tool that's all hype and no substance, or worse, trust it with important decisions when it's barely more sophisticated than a lookup table.

What to do about it

Develop a healthy scepticism. When someone tells you a tool is "AI-powered," ask what it actually does differently. Can it learn from new data? Does it improve over time? Or is it just following rules someone wrote? Understanding the basics of what AI actually is — and isn't — makes you much harder to fool. That knowledge protects both your career decisions and your company's budget.