When Everything Is AI, Nothing Is

Shaping what a product's AI actually is — and what it isn't.

When Highway built Miles, an AI assistant and brand mascot, the instinct was to attribute everything AI-adjacent to him — search, automation, and actual AI collapsed into one. Indiscriminate attribution doesn't just create a brand problem. It erodes user confidence in the features that are genuinely differentiated. I mapped the distinctions, built attribution standards across two products, and created a separate AI pattern now shipping across the platform. The standards I defined are now the baseline for how AI is described — protecting what's actually valuable from the noise around it.