positioning playbook for ai products.md

“AI-Powered” Isn’t a Position

A lot has changed since Arielle Jackson (First Round’s Head of Brand and Product Marketing) wrote her first Review article in 2015 on positioning your startup. For over 10 years, she’s helped hundreds of First Round founders with early positioning, brand identity, launch communications and marketing hiring — and while many of the fundamentals remain, her advice the last couple years has shifted as AI changes how companies do all of these things.

So we brought Jackson back to unpack what positioning looks like in the age of AI, and the unique advantage it gives companies when product differentiators can evaporate overnight. You can’t just ship “AI-powered” on your website (like you could, maybe even a year ago). Positioning and brand are the result of thoughtful choices founders must reinforce and continually update. With that, we’ll pass it to Jackson.

For decades, Silicon Valley operated on the assumption that the best product wins. But now models are shared, infrastructure is abstracted, and products that once required years of engineering work can launch in six days or six hours.

For the last couple of years, founders have been able to get away with simply using AI as their differentiator because slapping “AI” onto an existing category felt like something entirely new: "AI-powered provider credentialing," "AI communications for car dealerships," "AI agents for customs brokers.” The novelty made buyers pay attention. The problem is that "AI-powered X" stops being a position the second there are five credible "AI-powered X" companies. It's even worse when they all use the same gradients, the same sterile screenshots, and the same language that turns nobody off but nobody on either. They all claim to be the most accurate, the fastest, and most definitely enterprise-ready.

These products may not literally be identical, but because their differences aren’t legible, people perceive them as interchangeable. When that happens, people default to what feels safest, or in B2B, what's easiest to justify internally. Your product may actually be different and better, but if the difference isn't clear, it doesn't matter.

Brand can help you stand out, but it isn't a self-sustaining moat you install once and enjoy forever. It's a discipline that requires you to make distinct and coherent choices as the category normalizes and AI — whether it’s in your product, design or copy — pulls you toward sameness. Every time you abdicate a choice or play it safe, you become more interchangeable with every other AI startup in your space. And interchangeability is what kills you, especially when switching costs are near-zero.

If bottled water can do it, so can you.

Bottled water is about as close to a pure commodity as you can get. It’s heavily regulated and functionally interchangeable. There is no meaningful technical advantage. In most cases, the product inside the bottle is indistinguishable from the one next to it. And yet, some of the most distinctive brands in the world have been built in this category.

Take Evian and Liquid Death. Neither claims their water is the “best.” Evian’s point of view is that water isn't a commodity if you trace it back to its source. They position around purity and provenance. Liquid Death stands on the belief that water can be “metal.” They position water as a substitute for soda, energy drinks, or alcohol for people who’d otherwise choose those less hydrating options.

Water is water, but your decision which bottle to buy is largely driven by brand marketing.

Visual identity, tone, packaging, partnerships — everything then amplifies those positions. Evian is calm, minimal, and heritage, making the product feel timeless and premium (“Born in the French Alps”). Liquid Death is irreverent and loud, with packaging that looks like a tallboy (“Murder Your Thirst”). The Evian logo on a Liquid Death ad would make no sense, and vice versa.

The lesson isn’t that brand magically differentiates commodities. It’s that clear choices and reinforcement work even in one of the most commoditized categories imaginable.

So if you’re working in an AI category that’s starting to resemble a commodity, where do you start? Not with a logo, a tagline, or a launch video.

1. Find your opinionated POV

Start with what you believe that everyone else doesn’t. This is your timeless “why” that outlasts whatever you're shipping next quarter. A real POV attracts some people and repels others. That's the point. Most founders I work with try to skip this step and get straight to logos and launches, the more tangible side of marketing that they can readily observe in others. But POV is what gives everything downstream — your positioning, your visual identity, even your product decisions — a foundation on which to build.

Use your point of view to filter every decision. Before you can segment by audience or platform, you need the opinionated through-line that carries your story to be crystal clear.

A few examples:

No matter how well you articulate your point of view, if no one can understand what your product is or who it’s for you’ll be stuck with a great opinion and an unintelligible product.

2. Create clarity with positioning — and keep it current

A bland POV that makes everyone nod their heads in agreement doesn’t get you very far. And neither does saying you’re “for everyone,” because it doesn’t clarify anything when it comes to positioning. Positioning forces you to make a set of coherent choices:

Good positioning forces you to make tradeoffs and gives customers a clear reason to choose you.

In the past, I’d nudge founders towards thinking about their competing alternative not as another startup with minimal market share, but the status quo: manual workflows, legacy software, outsourced labor, or doing nothing at all. Rather than compare themselves to more direct competitors, I’d urge them to begin by redefining the problem and articulating a clear villain to their story that their audience would want to root against. A couple examples of companies that did this well:

Today, founders in AI categories don’t have the luxury of time. You often have to fight the status quo and multiple direct competitors simultaneously. You need a simple explanation for why you win versus the old way of doing things and why you win when the choice is between you and another startup in your space. Positioning used to last a year or two or maybe more. In this market, things change so quickly that it has to be a living thing you’re constantly revisiting every few months.

Take Cursor as an example. They didn’t initially position against GitHub Copilot, but against the status quo of writing code in an editor designed for humans. At their seed announcement (October 2023), Cursor was "AI-first" which was sufficient at the time.

Cursor's positioning in October 2023 versus now.

Within months, a wave of AI editors and coding agents appeared, and Cursor had to fight two fronts at once. Against the new pack of direct competitors, Cursor sharpened around depth of codebase understanding, agentic capabilities and a faster release cadence than anyone else.

3. Use design to bring your unique POV + position to life

Your brand is not your logo or simply a decorative coat of paint on top of your product. It’s who people think you are. So design should be the visible expression of every choice you’ve made so far.

It takes your POV and the clarity of your position and turns it into something people can recognize through visual identity, language, and your product itself. It dictates how you behave.

Here are two simple tests:

If you’re not happy with the results of those quick assessments, but your POV and position are solid, it’s time to refine your visual and verbal identity.

Make your visual identity unmistakably yours.

Let’s nerd out with some basic evolutionary neuroscience: us humans walk around with amazing machines in our heads that are designed to attend to novelty and ignore the familiar. In visual design, I often push founders who copy other startups toward distinctiveness. If everyone in your space is blue, be yellow.

Kill the jargon and have a personality.

Do you have five adjectives that describe your brand personality? Make sure these choices make sense with your positioning and point of view, and express something complex in a way that isn’t complicated.

Competitors will replicate your features and technical gaps will narrow. A good brand creates a specific kind of friction: copying your choices makes them look like a parody of you. Clay is one company that does this very well.

Clay: Clear POV + position + distinctive assets = friction against imitation

If a competitor adopted their look and feel and their language, or even their video style tomorrow, it would seem ridiculous.

Don’t outsource your brand to LLMs

You don’t have to avoid AI altogether — the key is to use AI in a way that reinforces good decisions. It’s tempting to prompt your way through positioning and generate infinite content. But AI amplifies what you feed it, so if your POV and position are generic, it amplifies generic.

When those things aren’t sharp, AI is a marketing slop machine. You need to continually reinforce decisions about what you believe, who you’re for, how you show up and what you refuse to do.