Morgan Bell’s article, AI Is Like Water, is about branding something destined to be commoditized. Frontier technologies are typically scarce and expensive in resources. AI will follow the same trajectory. So the real question becomes: when everyone can build anything, how do we distinguish good from great? That’s where design comes in: taste, context, ethics, and lived experiences are the new moat.
In the early adoption days, the technology itself carried the brand. The novelty of the tech is the value proposition. Take ChatGPT, for example. Most people don’t know what GPT stands for (it’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer, by the way), or how easily we accepted whimsical names like “Nano Banana” and broad labels like “agents.” In a few years, we’ll probably laugh about the agent craze, but right now it makes sense. It gives people a handle for something unfamiliar.
When everyone can build anything, how do we distinguish good from great? That’s where design in: taste, context, ethics, and lived experiences are the new moat.
Companies have two paths. One is to lean into the moment: emphasize what everyone is selling, ride the wave of familiarity, and claim early mindshare. The other is to leap ahead and naturalize AI and making it invisible, seamless, and part of everyday life. I believe the strongest brands do both. They capture attention now while evolving toward longevity, guided by a clear strategy for how their brand should grow as the tech matures.
That’s the lens I want to bring to AI brand experience, with a few behind-the-scenes reflections from my time leading Replit’s rebrand. It’s especially relevant as we mark the first anniversary of Replit Agent.
What makes a brand experience
Any item commoditized in its production has the same challenge. Take t-shirts, for example. You can buy one for a few dollars at Target, or you can buy one from a fashion house for hundreds. The fabric may not be that different, but the care, craft, and story determine who wears it and why. The same is true for AI. As the underlying models become cheaper and more accessible, brand is what sets one experience apart from another.
Here are the pillars I use to think about AI brand experience:
Mission and intention
A brand is anchored in purpose. Just because a company works in AI doesn’t mean every use case aligns with its values. Personally, I’m energized by building AI tools for teams of people, not only individuals. But there are applications, like deepfakes or simulated companionship, that I find less meaningful. That difference matters.
Mission and intention shape how customers interpret your brand. If your purpose feels opportunistic or misaligned, people notice. If it feels thoughtful and consistent, it builds trust. A strong AI brand isn’t just about being innovative; it’s about standing for something clear in a world where the technology can go in countless directions. Customers want to know why you’re building what you’re building, not just how clever your models are.
Customer enablement
Great brands don’t just showcase technology; they showcase what people can do with it. I often go back to Features vs. Benefits, a blog post from over a decade ago that makes a timeless point: features describe the product, benefits describe the customer’s outcome.
For AI, enablement is everything. Saying “our model is faster” or “our agent has more context” isn’t enough. What matters is: can it help a designer ship a prototype faster? Can it help a student learn to code? Can it help a founder bring an idea to market? Framing AI around enablement turns it from a technical curiosity into a meaningful tool in someone’s life. The brand connects by showing people not what AI is, but what it makes possible.
Memes and virality
Some of the most memorable brand moments are accidents. In 2013, Senator Marco Rubio paused mid-speech to grab a Poland Spring bottle on live television—a moment replayed endlessly online. Fitness influencer Ashton Hall went viral for a surreal morning routine that featured Saratoga water as a status symbol. Neither Poland Spring nor Saratoga engineered these moments, but they benefited from them.
The same will be true for AI. Your brand will be shaped not only by campaigns and launches, but by the memes and cultural artifacts people create around it. A screenshot, a clip, or even a joke can become part of your narrative. You can’t control virality, but you can design a brand that’s ready to ride those waves. The takeaway: leave room for serendipity in how people encounter your product.
Community
We’re still early in AI adoption. The mainstream hasn’t fully arrived; instead, the front lines are filled with power users such as developers, hackers, and tinkerers. These are the people who wore Google Glass in 2012 (yes, even Robert Scoble in the shower) before AR/VR became mainstream. They’re the ones who join Discord servers, write tutorials, and share half-broken demos.
For this audience, community isn’t a marketing channel but the core of the brand. They don’t want to be sold to; they want to be included, challenged, and rewarded. That means offering things like learning resources, ways to connect, opportunities to contribute, free credits to experiment, and yes, the classic developer sticker pack. A strong AI brand doesn’t just talk to its early adopters; it builds with them. And in doing so, it earns loyalty that lasts far beyond the hype cycle.
Shipping
In AI, shipping is branding. The field is moving too quickly for twice-a-year releases. Instead, the companies that feel alive and credible are the ones announcing progress constantly: daily, weekly, relentlessly. Each new launch, whether it’s a feature, an integration, or a model upgrade, reinforces your brand as fast-moving and innovative.
When you work in AI, speed is not an operational advantage; it’s the brand identity.
BTS: Replit’s rebrand
During my time at Replit, I had the honor of rebranding the company at a crucial time for the company. The problem we were facing was the brand perception of Replit as a hobby app or toy, and the shift to professional software makers with AI. Much of the churn and adoption was the perceptions of the brand and discoverability of AI.
That tension became even sharper as we entered the AI era. Replit was no longer just an online IDE and was becoming an AI-native software environment. The rebrand had to accomplish two things simultaneously: reposition Replit as a professional tool for serious developers while also embracing the new wave of AI-powered development.
To achieve the rebrand, I hired Design Business Company to partner with us. Any Head of Marketing knows that a rebrand can make or break your career. When I first showed the early concepts to the founders, I braced for impact. Fortunately, the response was positive.
This initial reaction gave a positive signal to keep pushing this path.
Idea to software, fast
The original tagline, “Idea to software, fast,” spoke to the speed and immediacy of Replit. Over time, it evolved to Idea to app, fast, which I didn’t mind. In an era of vibe coding and instant prototyping, “app” felt more accessible to customers than “software.” But the spirit was the same: Replit helps you go from spark to shipping with unprecedented velocity—something AI only accelerated.
Code as language, language as code
This idea became even more relevant with the rise of AI. Suddenly, English felt like the hottest new programming language. One of Amjad’s favorite research papers (and mine) is On the Naturalness of Software, which shows how code has language-like patterns. The reverse is also true: natural language can take on the structure of code.
The brand language leaned into this duality. ASCII could morph into imagery. Code could flow like text. We wanted to celebrate that blurred line — especially as AI collapsed the boundary between coding and speaking.
Honoring the sacred history of software
Amjad is a student of Silicon Valley’s history and the lineage of software development. We wanted to nod to that reverence. Building the future of AI-native software didn’t mean discarding the past. This meant carrying forward the lineage of early IDEs, hacker culture, and the craft of programming.
Pixels, characters, and atomic units
With AI, fewer users will need to understand the atomic units of code, but that doesn’t mean the aesthetics should disappear. We wanted the visuals to remain visible as an homage to the building blocks of computing: pixels, characters, and terminals. It was a way of saying: even as AI abstracts things away, we remember where this came from.
Replit Diatype
To reinforce that sense of speed and iteration, we worked with Dinamo to create a custom typeface: Replit Diatype. Built from pixel-like forms, it carried the feeling of motion — fast, iterative, alive, like the REPL loop itself.
It was one of those rare chances to nerd out about typography while tying it directly to brand strategy. The type wasn’t just decorative but embodied what Replit was about.
Recap
AI is moving toward near-zero marginal cost, so the battleground shifts from technology itself to brand perception.
A brand experience is more than visuals. It’s about mission, enablement, community, and shipping to customers.
Virality and memes are unpredictable, but they shape cultural memory around your product.
Power users and developers set the tone early; community is the soil where durable brands take root.
Speed is a brand moment in AI, with every launch contributing to reputation and narrative.
If AI is like water, then branding is the vessel that gives your product meaning. What people remember won’t be the raw technology, but the mission, voice, and community that carried it into their lives. Replit’s rebrand was a reminder that perception is as important as capability. In the age of AI, where the baseline is always shifting downward in cost, the companies that will stand out are the ones that ship quickly, speak authentically, and design with intention.
In the coming years, the leaders in AI won’t just be those with the best models. It will be the ones who make their brand and experience inseparable from how people think about what AI can do.
Made with love by these incredible people: Stewart Scott-Curran, Dani Baleson, Judson Collier, Cali Pitchel, and Jordan Egstad
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Great breakdown of what branding is esp to modern AI companies and how it played out in the Replit case study. I’ve noticed that branding convo is underrated as of late as AI companies scramble to compete with each other via product launches. Thanks for reminding us that branding is just as important long-term.