On September 29, the White House issued an executive order telling federal agencies to stop saying "artificial intelligence" and say "super intelligence" instead. It only covers government communications. Private companies don't have to do anything.
Two of them did anyway. On October 4, Elon Musk said SpaceXAI would become SpaceXSI. Six days later, Marc Benioff posted that Salesforce's AIForce platform is now SIForce.
I'm not getting into the politics. What caught my attention is simpler: neither company picked the timing of its own rename. Somebody else changed what a word meant, and they followed.
Every word in your name you didn't invent is a word someone else can redefine, and when they do, they're setting your rebrand schedule.
SpaceXSI is the second name in under a year
SpaceXAI only got its name in July, after SpaceX bought xAI. So this is the division's second identity in under a year. I doubt anyone there woke up thinking the old name had stopped working. The word moved and they went with it.
You see this at a smaller scale too, usually for better reasons. In April, SaaStock (the conference and community that supported early Intercom and Personio) renamed itself Shift AI. I get why. Alex Theuma, the founder, wrote that SaaS founders had stopped calling themselves SaaS founders, and a community named after a label people were walking away from had a real problem. Good call at the time. But they swapped one borrowed word for another, and six months later "AI" carries baggage nobody saw coming in April.
That's the trade with a borrowed word. Everyone already knows what "SaaS" or "AI" means, so you get recognition for free. What you give up is control over the meaning. That sits with the market, the press, the hype cycle and, as of this month, apparently the executive branch. Quartz ran a piece last week called "Everything's an AI company now," and its opening example was Napster. When everybody uses the same word, it stops telling a buyer much of anything.
Intuit added AI and didn't rename a thing
Compare that with the companies that did serious AI work this year and kept their names.
Intuit just launched a new identity with JKR. The AI layer got its own name, Intuit Intelligence, built on the master brand, which is a word Intuit owns. TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma and Mailchimp all kept their names. If the AI vocabulary shifts again next month, Intuit doesn't have to touch any of it.
Calendly did a quieter version. It's grown from a scheduling tool into a broader platform with AI features, and the Smith & Diction rebrand changed the symbol, the palette and the product icons. Still Calendly. Pleo went from expense management for small businesses to a spend platform for mid-market and enterprise finance teams, which is a big jump for a fintech. Porto Rocha kept the name and kept the pink (a little cooler and brighter now).
Every one of those moves happened in the descriptor, the brand architecture or the visual system. The names stayed put, and that's why none of them is scrambling this week.
Where trend words belong
To be fair to trend words, they do real work. They help with search, they help investors pattern-match, and they help in the three seconds someone gives your homepage before deciding whether you're relevant. I'm not going to pretend that away.
Sometimes renaming is right, too. Freepik became Magnific because it grew from a graphic-resources search engine into an AI tools platform, and the old name described a business that didn't exist anymore. A company outgrowing its name is a much better reason to rename than a word changing meaning underneath you.
So put the trend word somewhere it's cheap to change. You can rewrite a descriptor line ("the AI platform for X") in an afternoon. A product name takes a quarter, maybe. A company name means a rebrand, a domain migration and a year of "formerly known as." Even in the SaaS-to-AI debate, Balderton's Dave Kellogg argued that a real pivot means reinventing the product, and Theuma agreed most companies are only changing their branding. I'd go further. The rename is the least important part of a pivot, so it shouldn't be the part someone else gets to force on you.
Two things to try this week
First, write down every word in your company name, your product names and your homepage headline. For each one, ask who else gets to decide what that word means. If the answer is a hype cycle, a regulator or a competitor with a bigger ad budget, move the word down a level: out of the name and into the descriptor, or out of the descriptor and into the body copy.
Second, open your pitch deck to slide two and delete every borrowed term. AI, agentic, SaaS, whatever shows up next quarter. Read what's left. If it still says something specific and true about who you serve and what changes for them, you're in good shape. If it's mostly white space, the trend word was doing your positioning for you, and you don't get a say in when it stops.
Hit reply and tell me which word in your company name you'd delete if you could. I read every one.
Daniel G. Bright Founder, Bright Studios
