With the explosion of new artificial intelligence start-ups over the last decade, naming trends for companies and products are becoming visible. And while it’s generally best to avoid trends – today’s daring will become tomorrow’s dated – getting familiar with current naming approaches can fire up creative thinking.
Let’s take a look.
AI at play
How lucky that AI is a versatile pair of vowels. Startups are using “AI” in all areas of their company names – beginning, middle, and end. This isn’t a bad strategy, as incorporating “AI” in the name effortlessly identifies the type of company or product.
This trend includes names like AIbrain (augmenting human intelligence), Aicumen (intelligent applications using blockchain), and Clarifai (a deep learning platform).
Many names that use AI also enjoy in wordplay provided by the close sound between AI and “eye”. OpenAI is a clever example as it suggest “open eye”. This in turn leads to “eye-opening”, a way of describing the surprise we feel when we discover something previously unknown.
Another name that cleverly uses wordplay (though as part of the domain) is Sea.AI, a former River + Wolf client. The mission of Sea.AI is to detect floating objects at sea through the use of AI enhanced cameras. The homophones “sea” and “see”, when partnered with AI, suggest vision and sea.
But some caveats
Exercise caution with wordplay; while successful wordplay is magical, forced attempts can sound cheesy, which is not a tonality befitting of an advanced technology.
Additionally, you might want to be mindful when using acronyms like “AI” and “GPT” into your company or product name. As the technology evolves, these terms may be dropped or become dated. Industry terms can also become tired at some point.
“Deep” and “alpha” are great words and speak volumes about AI, but they’ve been widely used in the AI landscape and are now are passé .
Examples include names like DeepMind, DeepLearning, DeepGenomics, Deep L, DeepAlpha, AlphaGeometry, AlphaZero, Zeta Alpha, and AlephAlpha.
The staying power of allusive names
AI names can also be allusive. Allusive names, also known as arbitrary names, are real dictionary words that have no direct tie to the underlying goods or services. Such names retain their freshness and are great springboards for memorable brand storytelling.
In the AI space, Rainbird Technologies (decision intelligence platform) is a wonderful example of an allusive name. A rainbird is a bird whose cries are popularly believed to predict rain. And predictive powers are baked into AI.
Similarly, names like Moonvalley AI (a text-to-video AI platform) and NorthPole (an architecture and a programming model for neural inference), are home runs in the allusive AI naming space.
In our digital world, there is something very appealing about names that evoke the natural world. As branding guru Marty Neumeier counsels, when everyone is zigging – zag. In an industry dominated by names with a futuristic or tech tonalities, Rainbird, NorthPole, and Moonvalley are names that zag.
The URL in the haystack
Securing the still highly sought-after dot com is increasingly challenging. Single word names in natural English, such as Rainbird, are rarely available without an added word or extension. Adding “technologies” enabled Rainbird to procure a dot com address.
That said, for brevity, you might consider letting go of the dot com and using “AI” as a domain extension. Despite AI being the Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) for Anguilla, it is a perfectly acceptable extension for an AI offering.
In this way, it is similar to “io”, the ccTLD for Indian Ocean, a domain ending that is popular with tech start-up founders (who no doubt found it appealing as it mirrors the initials used for input/output (I/O), the information processing system used to send and receive data from a computer hardware component, device, or network.
Another popular domain ending to consider for an AI address is XYZ. This is a versatile domain with a contemporary flair that has been gaining popularity since ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Name) released it as a gTLD (generic Top Level Domain) to the general public in July, 2014.
Tech companies often try to humanize their AI products with names like Hank, Alexa, Claude, Watson, and Aiden. Anthropomorphizing AI companies and products can lessen the anxiety consumers may feel about this emerging technology. Human names can also be less prone to mispronunciations and misspellings (though someone named Siobhan or Caoimhe may beg to differ).
In contrast, there’s a trend of unintentionally difficult-to-say or spell or capitalized names like NVIDIA, Baidu, and NIRAMAI. This is not Recommended. I mean not recommended. I mean not RECOMMENDED.
No, those are not typos. Check out the capitalization journey of NVIDIA.
If Shakespeare can do it, why not me?
A tried-and-true naming strategy is to create a new word or neologism. The master of the neologism is Shakespeare, who reputedly created 1,700 – including such wonders as cold-blooded, new-fangled, moonbeam, and eyeball.
And though few can rival Shakespeare’s prodigious output, AI technology founders are giving it a go with names like Unbabel (AI translation service) and Applitools (AI-powered visual testing and monitoring platform).
Clearly not Shakespearian level word-making, but in fairness, Shakespeare could miss the mark too, producing such linguistic grotesques as “bepray” and “congreeted”.
No one is perfect.
Know Thyself
It would be remiss not to take a cursory look at the existing AI platforms for naming brands, among them, Corsearch’s Name Generator, Namelix, Neuronaming, Namium, and NameMesh.
For many reasons, AI is not yet successful in brand naming, as these monikers demonstrate. For a brief look at why this is the case, have a look here and here.
Setting aside the challenges AI has faced in naming itself, it’s crucial to acknowledge the remarkable and continually evolving power of AI.
Given its awe-inspiring capabilities, the names developed for AI companies, products, and services should be no less marvelous than the technology they represent.
