How to Position the AI Platforms

A Product Marketing Challenge

It’s been a few years since the launch of ChatGPT brought generative AI into the mainstream. The big players have now largely emerged, with OpenAI leading the charge, the tech giants Google and Microsoft catching up fast, and younger companies like Anthropic and Perplexity looking to carve out their own loyal user bases.

Right now, it’s a wild west. Each week, something new is released that feels like it has changed the game yet again. It’s a race for innovation, but also eyeballs and users. And while the rising tide of the product category is currently lifting all ships, eventually the dust will settle and every consumer will have a platform of preference. That makes clarity on positioning, target audience, and differentiation extremely important (and don’t forget brand building).

So I thought it'd be fun to do a product marketing exercise to see if we can coax out what positioning (inspired by the great April Dunford) might look like for some of these companies longer term.

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OpenAI / ChatGPT

OpenAI is the category-definer. Its lead product, ChatGPT, is the name people go to when they talk about generative AI. It has become the default, the byword, the Coca-Cola, the McDonald’s - the Google, even - of this space. And that ubiquity is incredibly powerful.

But ubiquity isn’t always defendable. The pace of innovation in this space right now is extraordinary, and you can’t underestimate the power of distribution. Big tech players like Microsoft, Google and Apple have the advantage of their tools being in the hands of millions, maybe billions, of people, via hardware and OS-level integrations.

There’s a case to be made for OpenAI leaning into being the AI for generalists: curious people who want to explore, learn, ideate, and get stuff done. That could mean productising workflows for creators, founders, entrepreneurs and people who want to improve themselves. Not by narrowing, but by embracing broad, AI-powered productivity tools.

There’s also a platform opportunity: Sam Altman has hinted at building an ‘OpenAI identity’ that spans API and consumer experiences, effectively becoming the OS layer for this new era of digital intelligence e.g. your ChatGPT preferences, workspaces, and history plugging in to all the other tools and devices you use - like your Google account or Apple ID, but for AI. ChatGPT’s mass popularity opens up a ton of huge opportunities, from social and community to turning its marketplace into a true value add.

Potential Positioning Statement:
ChatGPT is for curious generalists like creators, founders, and entrepreneurs who want a powerful thinking partner to explore, learn, and build with. Unlike other assistants focused on narrow workflows and use cases, ChatGPT offers a flexible, multimodal interface and a rapidly evolving suite of products trusted by millions of users around the world.

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Google / Gemini

With generative AI being the first technology to challenge Google’s search dominance in decades, the company really has skin in the game. The good news is that Gemini is technically excellent. Gemini 2.5 Pro scores highly compared with the other platforms and Google has a huge advantage in distribution. It’s the default on Android, is reportedly being explored for integration into Apple’s products, and is baked into Google Workspace - giving it a distinct edge in the B2B space.

But there also seems to be an identity crisis. Gemini is serving both consumer and B2B audiences in parallel, without a clear core user. The product sits between use cases, not clearly optimised for any one of them, which makes it hard to tell a cohesive story or build passionate user communities.

It feels, though, like Google could own the how of AI. Its Chain-of-Thought reasoning (CoT), which Gemini is embedding directly into the UX, is a bold move away from the way some of the other chatbots interact with humans. Gemini can structure plans, synthesise across documents and code like the other AI chatbots, but at the same time show its reasoning to the user - in real-time.

That gives the potential to be the thoughtful AI assistant for builders and technical creators - people who don’t just want fast answers, but traceable ones. Rather than challenge OpenAI on broad creativity or Claude on ethical transparency, Gemini could differentiate by leaning hard into being smart, explainable, and seamlessly integrated into real workflows. For people who care about how things work and the quality of the process.

Combined with Google’s Workspace integrations, Gemini could become a premium productivity platform that appeals to developers, analysts, and product teams - but it definitely needs to start marketing and messaging more clearly to these kinds of users.

Potential Positioning Statement:
For builders, analysts, and technical creators who want a superior AI tool that can reason, code, and explain its thinking. A thoughtful AI assistant that combines world-class model performance with structured, step-by-step answers and deep workspace integrations. Unlike assistants that provide opaque responses, Gemini embeds chain-of-thought reasoning and gives users the tools to co-create, edit, and iterate in real time.

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Anthropic / Claude

Anthropic stands out from the pack for me. Its GenAI product Claude is framed around safety, interpretability, and friendliness - underpinned by rigorous research into constitutional AI and aligned behaviour. And the brand itself feels more like a research company, rather than a commercial product. But they’re also going for growth - recently launching a higher education offering, announcing partnerships with enterprise companies like Databricks, and leading the market in AI transparency.

Claude’s messaging can still feel vague. It’s not completely obvious who should use it or when. The research-first vibe can feel academic or distant to the average user. And it's not a household name in the same way OpenAI is.

One potential option is for Claude to position itself as the AI for ‘high-stakes thinking’, where reliability, clarity, and nuance matter. That means legal teams, researchers, policy advisors, therapists. Anthropic’s work on making LLMs understandable gives them a good potential moat here. Their ethos is distinct: transparent, ethical, and rigorous.

Potential Positioning Statement:
Claude is for professionals in high-stakes fields like law, policy, and education, who need safe, reliable, and relatable AI collaboration. Transparency is at the heart of Claude, helping users understand and trust the reasoning behind every answer. Unlike other general-purpose tools, Claude leads with safety, clarity, and rigour to produce reliable outcomes for work that matters.

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Perplexity

Perplexity is playing in the space between search and chatbots, thinking of itself as an ‘answer engine’ (which, you could argue, is kind of positioning in itself.) It’s fast, citation-rich, and efficient. The UX isn’t quite as smooth as the likes of ChatGPT and Claude, and there’s not a huge amount of clarity about who it’s for. So there’s a need for laser-focused messaging here.

Perplexity should lean into serving the research crowd: journalists, analysts, academics. People who prefer detail over creativity and reference-ability over style, and whose work will be scrutinised - meaning facts and proof are key.

Potential Positioning Statement:
Perplexity is for knowledge workers like analysts, journalists, and academics who want fast, reliable, and source-backed answers. Perplexity is a research-grade answer engine that surfaces verifiable insights in seconds. Unlike some chatbots that are hard to verify, or search engines that overload, Perplexity combines conversational context with citation-first synthesis for serious responses.

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I won’t lie, this was a pretty tricky exercise! In this wild west era of generative AI, it’s tough to capture the unique nuances in each offering to understand which product might be best for which audiences. Things are moving so fast and, as I’ve said before, product features are not a moat. The competition can always catch up. So, as always, it’s about your values and what you stand for that sets you up for the long run, and really having a clear target audience in mind.

Hopefully this is some inspiration for running your own positioning exercises in the near future. Let me know how it goes.

Cheers! 👋

P.S. If you haven’t already, please take 5 minutes to fill in this survey about how to define product marketing in 2025. (There’s a prize draw too!)