WLunos hen, a AI start in new York City was gearing up for launch, its founder and chief executive, Duncan Barrigan, and his team wanted to make a splash. So they paid $3,500 to do something unconventional: hire a horse and a cowboy to lasso the Wall Street bull.
On a sultry late September evening, the cowboy galloped towards the iconic sculpture of Lower Manhattan. Dressed in ranch attire and a western hat stamped with the Lunos logo, he lassoed the bull’s horns before the eyes of guests and curious passers-by. He and the horse then toured the statue, handing out cowboy hats and marked stress balls.
The goal was simple: present Lunos’ pitch of “taming the Wild West” of accounts receivable in the most literal and public way possible. The startup uses AI to automate invoices, track balances and track payments.
“We were trying to find, in a sea of similarities, how we could stand out as a startup to be reckoned with,” said Alex Mann, head of growth at Lunos.
With more than 90,000 AI companies Around the world, by one count, many companies promising to automate the same tasks at work and in everyday life are finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate themselves on their products alone. Many enterprise AI companies have relied on hyped messages delivered through predictable channels such as trade shows, white papers, billboards, and digital ads. A live scene in front of the Wall Street bull market represents a change in form that can seem strangely out of sync with the conventional back-office software these companies build.
The coup reflects a broader shift among AI companies that are turning to provocative marketing to stand out in a crowded, capital-rich industry. In 2025 alone, AI startups raised an estimated $202.3 billion globally, up from $114 billion the year before, according to Basic Crunch. Digital ad spending for generative AI applications also exceeded $200 million in the second quarter of 2025, Sensor tower the data shows.
As classic claims about productivity and speed blur, some startups are abandoning corporate messaging in favor of spectacle. And while these tricks seem to work, marketing experts say the shift reflects an industry under increasing pressure.
Provoke startups
Startups such as Artisan AI, Cluely and Friend have provoked backlash over ads suggesting their tools could replace human workers, help cheat in job interviews or replace real friendships: decisions that critics say amount to bad taste messages orchestrated to “anger.”
Wary of similar accusations, business-focused AI startups are experimenting with less controversial gadgets for a variety of reasons.
For Virio, the draw is viral content. In September, the AI marketing startup hired cowboys to walk two horses around the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco during HubSpot Inbound, a major marketing conference. From 8 a.m. to 11 a.m., co-founder Emmett Chen-Ran walked alongside the horses holding a Virio banner reading “Content That Drives the Pipeline.”
The objective was to attract the attention of founders and managers of companies with 50 or more employees, Virio’s target customers. Chen-Ran said such showmanships are rare in the B2B world, where companies sell products to other businesses rather than consumers, giving the operation added novelty. The real goal, however, was for conference attendees to take photos and share them on LinkedIn, fueling the online engagement at the center of Virio’s marketing strategy.
“You don’t do a stunt for the stunt itself,” Chen-Ran said. “You do it for LinkedIn posts and the content they generate.”
While Virio was leaning into the spectacle, Personal AI, a small language model startup, was using provocation as a visual metaphor for its main message.
In June, at the HubSpot AI Summit (a separate conference from HubSpot Inbound) in San Francisco, Suman Kanuganti, CEO of Personal AI, I went on stage topless wear only sports shorts. Kanuganti began with the phrase “LLMs are naked” displayed on the screen behind him. He argued that the large models that power ChatGPT and Gemini leave users “exposed” and “insecure.” Personal AI, which allows companies to create individualized AI models by training on their own documents, he said, is “the missing piece of equipment.” As he slowly dressed, each item of clothing, from the Arc’teryx jacket to his Salomon shoes, symbolized a layer of protection he personally trusted. The goal was to show that, just as people select clothes from familiar brands, businesses should have access to AI systems built with transparent guardrails: privacy, security and reliability.
Trapped in a “land grab mentality”
Marketing experts say the rise of these tactics speaks to the pressure AI startups face in a rapidly expanding industry.
Emily Heyward, co-founder and CEO of Red Antler, a marketing agency for startups, said founders feel trapped in a “land grab mentality” desperate to capture attention before a rival does, even if the product is still maturing, while investors are pouring billions into AI companies.
“Few, if any, of these companies are currently realizing their ultimate product vision,” Heyward said. “It’s really about making enough noise that people compare you to the other, and then stick with you as technology evolves.”
Tom Goodwin, co-founder of All We Have Is Now, a business consulting firm, takes a more cynical view. Goodwin says there’s “a certain degree of desperation and urgency” behind many of these stunts. AI is subversive, he argues, and lends itself to provocative and eye-catching marketing.
“These companies are terrified that no one will notice them,” Goodwin said.
He goes further, saying there is “a certain degree of lack of morality” in some AI products, pointing to the theft of intellectual property, the elimination of jobs and the rejection of human values. In a media environment fragmented between social platforms and increased political theater, fear, he says, becomes a marketing tool. Startups that exploit this anxiety are looking for one of the few reliable ways to reclaim attention.
While these startups insist their tactics were strategic and effective in driving sales, Virio, Personal AI and Lunos say stoking negative discourse just to get attention doesn’t align with their values.
The less incendiary and more controlled version of stunt marketing appears to be paying off, but with mixed results.
Virio’s stunt didn’t go as planned. Few people passed by and the horses at the Moscone Center moved too quickly for most people to take good photos. Chen-Ran nonetheless said the company created its own LinkedIn content from the event, generated more than 300 qualified visitors to its website and gained exposure after “countless” people recognized the team at the conference, leading to calls with a few potential clients.
At Personal AI, Kanugati said his onstage performance helped solidify the company’s positioning and secure additional conference bookings, leading to a handful of small client contracts.
For Lunos, the impact was immediate. Mann said thousands of people visited the site, LinkedIn posts about the Wall Street stunt drew hundreds of likes and comments, and word-of-mouth referrals increased in CFO Slack groups. Within three months of launch, Mann said inbound leads filled the sales pipeline with hundreds of qualified prospects. The publicity even sparked an influx of applications, including from McKinsey consultants seeking management positions in business operations.
Lunos now has paying customers, and the team says the volume and quality of inbound interest has given them confidence they can convert even more early leads into customers.
As Mann said, the move “opened the door for us to think creatively about how we want to design future activation campaigns,” a sign that the pressure to stand out is unlikely to fade.