Outside of my work at Redgate, I serve as an AI Advisor to organizations and individual investors. It’s a role I genuinely enjoy and it gives me the opportunity to help drive clear direction around AI projects, policies, and governance. But one increasingly frustrating pattern has emerged from this work over the past year, and I think it’s worth talking about: the rise of what I’ve started calling the AI snake-oil salesman.
Whenever a technology disrupts an industry as dramatically as AI has disrupted tech, the profit opportunity attracts not just innovators but also opportunists, con artists, and even charlatans. Fake products all dressed up in impressive language and AI tech. I’ve encountered them on advisory projects and in investment reviews, and I’ve gotten good at recognizing the patterns. These red flags aren’t secret and I truly believe anyone can learn to spot them, so I figured I’d save the technical community some due diligence and share what I’ve collected.
The Red Flags
- They have a solution without a problem. Or worse, they’re actively shopping for a problem their product can pretend to solve.
- Their website contradicts their pitch. They’ll tell you AI is at the core of everything they do, but their web presence was built with basic traditional tools and shows no evidence of the sophisticated infrastructure they’re describing. The contradiction is the tell and no react code in sight.
- All their content reads like it was written by AI. Lots of buzz words, impressive-sounding phrases, and absolutely nothing substantive about how their AI actually functions or what’s under the hood.
- In person, they speak in magic, not mechanics. Whether they’re talking about RAG, machine learning, or generative AI, it’s all buzz words and hand-waving. Ask them about workflows, architecture, security, or frameworks and watch the conversation go sideways.
- They ask what your problems are before telling you what their product does. This is a classic manipulation pattern. They’re reverse-engineering their pitch in real time to match whatever pain you just described.
- They target non-technical investors and unpaid technical talent. They’re looking for people with money who don’t know enough to ask hard questions, and developers willing to work for equity in something that doesn’t yet exist.
- They hide behind intellectual property. There’s a difference between protecting trade secrets and being unable to explain what you’re building. If someone can’t describe their product’s purpose clearly, without giving anything proprietary away, then that’s not caution, but a gap.
What Legitimate AI Work Actually Looks Like
For contrast: credible AI practitioners can explain their architecture in plain language. They know what problem they’re solving and why AI is the right tool for it and not just the trendy one. They welcome technical scrutiny rather than deflecting it. And they don’t need your investment before they can tell you what they’re building.
A Note on Hope and Reality
Every time I encounter one of these, I genuinely hope I’m wrong. I’d love to hear a year later that they found their footing and built something real. But so far, without exception, every AI snake-oil salesman I’ve flagged is still searching for traction, or worse, still searching for a problem and often, it’s well over a year later that I’m seeing this.
Do your due diligence. Ask hard questions. And if someone can’t answer them, that’s your answer.
