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Marketing products as “AI-powered” can hurt, not boost, sales. getty Business leaders are crazy for AI. Many firms are claiming to be “AI-first” enterprises. In the latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI, 78% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, up from 72% in early 2024 and 55% a year earlier. The AI bug has infected marketers, too. Every product launch seems to feature “AI-powered” this and “artificial intelligence” that. But here’s the problem: many of your customers hate it. New research reveals a surprising truth. When Washington State University and Temple University researchers split test participants into two groups, one seeing “AI-powered” products and the other seeing “new technology” products. There was no halo effect for AI. The AI group was consistently less likely to buy. In that study, published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, researchers presented 1,000 respondents with product descriptions, finding that products described as using AI were consistently less popular. The Psychology Behind The AI Backlash The reason isn’t rational. It’s emotional. “The main findings of this study is the use of AI decreases emotional trust,” says Mesut Cicek, assistant professor at Washington State University, according to CX Dive. “The consumers have trust issues with AI, and then also it decreases the purchase intention.” Think about what happens in your customer’s brain when they see “AI-powered.” You hope they’re thinking about efficiency or innovation. More likely, they’re thinking about job losses, hallucinations, pizza glue, privacy breaches and machines making decisions they don’t understand. Maybe, even the terminator robots of a dystopian future. “When we were thinking about this project, we thought that AI will improve [consumers’ willingness to buy] because everyone is promoting AI in their products,” says Dogan Gursoy, a regents professor at Washington State and study co-author,…

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Filed under: News - @ July 1, 2025 7:25 pm