'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused

UK companies are rebranding ordinary automation as AI, with PR executives describing 'yoga-level' contortions to present non-AI products as AI-driven. The trend mirrors the 'dot-com' rebranding wave of the late 1990s. Practitioners should be skeptical of vendor AI claims and demand technical specificity about model architecture, training, and inference pipelines.