60% of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff, and 61% can't name a brand doing it well

A survey of 1,200 consumers says the 'AI' label now repels them

WordPress VIP's Future of the Web 2026 report, built on a survey of 1,200 US consumers, lands on a number that should worry marketing departments: 60% view 'AI' in brand communications as a negative, not a value-add. It's surrounded by figures pointing the same direction — 74% say the internet feels less human than a decade ago, 61% can't name a single brand using AI effectively, 16% think no brand does it well, and consumers hit "bot fatigue" after roughly 40 minutes online.

The report's own prescription is for brands to build sites that feed AI engines structured, citable content while still giving humans a reason to stay — human-centered design enhanced by AI, not AI-first. Enterprise teams, it notes, already pour about 16.6 hours a week into improving their AI visibility.

The thread's translation of 'AI': 'we fired employees to make more money'

The discussion didn't argue with the 60% — it explained it, with a precision the report's corporate framing avoids. The bluntest read came early:

"It can't really be because 'AI' frequently means 'we fire employees to make more money. And by the way, we don't actually care about quality'. Right?" — a commenter decoding the subtext of the label

A roboticist put the consumer–business gap in one line: "AI feels like 'quick and cheap at the cost of quality' so I completely get why consumers would dislike it while business people love it." And one engineer reduced it to a definition: "'AI' translates into 'we treated your problem as a black box; if it doesn't work we'll fix it later by throwing more data at it!'"

The marketing problem: the word says nothing

A second strand argued the label fails because it's empty.

"Maybe if marketing people stopped using the incredibly generic term 'AI', and started actually saying what something is, it might work better. When you say 'this app is powered by AI', do you mean Skynet, an LLM, or a basic machine learning system?" — a developer on the vagueness of the term

That tracks with what worked before: as one commenter pointed out, ML features quietly improved products for years and "most people did not know or care how it worked." The current wave inverts it — technology first, benefit second, a worse UI wearing a buzzword.

One builder confirmed brands are already adapting by hiding the thing entirely:

"We are adding AI features to our product and being very careful to disguise them and make it not 'feel' like AI. Our customer base about 70% can't stand AI, 20% doesn't care, and 10% thinks it's the greatest thing in the world." — a product builder describing his own customer split

Why the label sticks anyway: it's aimed at investors, not buyers

The most useful reversal explains why brands keep slapping 'AI' on things consumers hate. The audience for the word was never the consumer.

"AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry… while consumers just want to know 'what is this product going to actually do for me.'" — a developer on who the AI label is really for

A Berlin CTO drew the historical parallel directly: "It's a bit like 25 years ago when people were slapping web on everything to make it seem better," driven by investors who want every portfolio company to be "an AI thingy." Another backend developer sharpened it into an image — "the dotcom boom but most consumers have a negative sentiment toward internet stuff, it's mostly just CEOs measuring their internet dicks against each other." And the comparison nobody wanted: "Crypto tier… but just like crypto, the investors want to see that signal regardless of any underlying substance."

The split that explains the whole number

The report frames its 60% as a UX challenge to be designed around. The thread frames it as a structural mismatch: the word 'AI' is a financing signal pointed at investors, and consumers are simply overhearing it. That's why disguising AI features works while advertising them backfires — and why the cleanest advice in the thread was also the simplest: say what the product does, drop the acronym, and let the feature earn its keep without the badge.