The fear was that B2B businesses were going to make the same mistake. So we went and counted, in the part of the market we know best. We read the homepages of 59 UK software businesses that sell to other businesses, then went back to see what the same pages said in 2024 and 2025. (The full study is in our report.)
I’m happy to say we were wrong. (I like being wrong.) In UK SaaS headlines, that didn’t happen. AI is something your product uses, and most of these businesses seem to have worked that out. But they’ve stopped halfway, and that’s a harder problem to fix.
Of the 59, 39 mention AI somewhere on their homepage. Just over a third (22) show it on the first screen, before you scroll. Only 10 put it in the headline, by which I mean the page title, the H1, or the small line sitting above it. Then we went back in time. Among the 38 we could track in the Internet Archive, AI mentions went from six in 2024 to 16 in 2025 and 23 now. AI in the headline went from one to five. (The archive misses some headlines built in code, so trust the direction more than the exact counts.)
So AI went onto these pages fast, and stayed below the headline while it did. I was pleasantly surprised. I thought the jump onto AI, especially in the headline, would be higher, because there’s a lot of pressure to mention it. It’s a trend. (And none of this is a judgement on the companies that do put it in.)
A handful have taken AI back out of their headline, and one went the other way. We’ve started calling it a holding pattern: AI on the page, and nothing in the headline that says why to buy.
The numbers make you want to ask why. Is it a market response, customers asking these companies, “Where’s your AI?” Or do they feel they’ve just got to do it? And the next thing: what’s replacing it?
Homepages can’t tell you motive, so what follows is my read, not the data’s.
We worked with a business recently that had started putting AI into everything. Its investors were looking for AI businesses, so it had to become one, and be seen to be one, without necessarily explaining what the AI was doing. When we pushed back (what does the AI actually do?) there was a bit of humming and hawing. They were using AI, and using it cleverly. They just hadn’t worked out the value it brought to their customers.
I think that’s a lot of what’s going on. AI implies efficiency, it implies technical prowess, it implies innovation, it implies forward thinking. It’s a badge that implies a lot, and it’s useful for that. But if there’s no depth to it, it doesn’t really mark you out as particularly different. If most of these companies are doing it, it just feels like you’re an also-ran.
That’s a shame, because the way you’re using the technology could absolutely be something of real value to your customer. Wrapping it in an AI blanket isn’t doing the work you’re doing any justice. You don’t see accountancies saying they’re Excel-powered. AI is, like anything, a tool, and you’ve got to explain it rather than just say you’re using it. A really important tool, a very interesting tool, and it’ll lead to some great advances in this software.
What’s replacing it, at least at the top of the page, is a new word. In 2024 and 2025, none of the 38 tracked headlines led with “intelligent” or anything like it. Now three do. I do feel it’s a little bit hedging. It’s AI with the “artificial” dropped, which is interesting. Does artificial sound cheaper? I think intelligent is basically shorthand for AI, but it’s also trying to give the product some provenance: this is still being guided by humans. That isn’t a bad thing. I just think it’s still not answering the question of what that means. (Reading “intelligent” as AI is our call, and each business may mean something more specific by it. The lines are in the report so you can judge for yourself.)
Dext shows how this happens, and how to get out of it. In 2025 its headline was “Powerful bookkeeping software for small businesses”. That says what the product is and who it’s for. This year the top line became “Intelligent bookkeeping automation”. What it loses there is who it’s for. (Maybe that’s deliberate. Small businesses are still in the page title.) Reading the new line, I don’t know what automation means. I don’t know what intelligent means. It sounds great, and it’s a little bit gibberish. Powerful didn’t promise much either, to be fair, but at least I knew what it was and who it was for.
And that’s what we saw across the board. Everybody is saying the same thing, which is a category descriptor rather than a product value statement.
There’s more on Dext’s page, though. Directly beneath, at the same size, it says “Get hours back”. Under that: “AI does the repetitive work and keeps you in control.” That’s very nearly the whole answer. The headline makes a promise about the customer’s time, and AI turns up underneath it as the explanation of how. April Dunford, author of Obviously Awesome, makes the same point: new AI capabilities usually strengthen value you already deliver, so they belong under it, as part of how you deliver it. Bolting AI on used to reassure buyers. Now, she says, “that simply isn’t enough.”
What Dext hasn’t done yet is put a number on it. Without knowing the product, I’d be more explicit: “the powerful bookkeeping software that saves you money.” You go, okay, I’m interested. Now, obviously, that needs to be backed up by proof, and the proof is where AI earns its place. You can’t just make those statements.
There could be another reason to keep AI out of the headline. Look at the big banks going to their law firms and saying, fine, if you’re using AI, we’re expecting you to be cheaper, because a lot of the grunt work’s gone. Last month the FT reported exactly that. Citigroup’s head of legal said that if AI has cut the hours, “our expectation is for costs to come down significantly per transaction.”
Law firms bill by the hour and SaaS mostly doesn’t, so it’ll land differently in software. I think the question is going to be, “Why is it so expensive?” And then somebody will say, “Listen, I can just build this in Claude Code in two weeks, so why would I use yours?” Claude Code is a competitor, as much as anybody else. You need an answer to that, and it’s not difficult. SaaS businesses tend to hide the hard stuff to make it feel pain-free: the servers that don’t go down, and the backups you never think about. But that’s exactly the pain you’d take on if you built it yourself. It’s the same move as the headline: say what you’re saving the customer before they work it out for themselves. It’s worth bringing up.
Fintech was the quietest sector we looked at, with nine of the 21 not mentioning AI at all. The honest answer is I don’t know why. I think the question in fintech is probably trust. Do you trust your money to an AI? What happens if something goes wrong? Is it the AI’s fault, the company’s fault, or the bank’s? Maybe it’s just a traditionally cautious space being cautious. And with fintech, it’s definitely about minimising risk and maintaining reputation as much as money. Soldo’s headline does exactly that: “Spending freedom for teams. Total control for finance.” It’s a promise about control, and AI only turns up further down the page.
So what do you do about it? I’d start with three questions.
1. Can you say what your product does without using the words “AI” or “intelligent”?
If you can’t, I’d push you to try harder.
2. How does your use of AI make your customers money or save them money?
If you can’t say that, and lead with it, then why should I pick you? At the moment AI is everywhere. You can buy it for less than £20 a month. If I can get that myself, what value are you adding that makes you better than the thing I can buy at a consumer level? Put a number on it if you can.
3. If you took AI off your homepage tomorrow, would a buyer still know why to pick you?
This is the ultimate test of the other two. Just take it off. Is your product still clearly something that stands out in its competitive landscape? Bearing in mind your competition might just be ChatGPT, never mind another software company. If it all still holds, AI goes underneath, as the proof of how you deliver.
It’s going to be interesting when the hype passes. Nobody writes “Excel-powered” on their homepage, and in a few years nobody will write “AI-powered” either. (Yes, another prediction. I’ve told you I like being wrong.) When that happens, whatever’s left in your headline is your positioning. Better to write it now, while it can still set you apart.
The full study, Where did “AI-powered” go?, has the numbers by sector and every before-and-after headline.