when Lunos, an AI startup in New York City, was getting ready to launch, its founder and chief executive, Duncan Berrigan, and his team wanted to make a splash. So he spent $3,500 to do something unconventional: hire a horse and a cowboy to calm down the Wall Street bulls.
On a hot evening in late September, the shepherd gallop race Towards the iconic sculpture in lower Manhattan. Dressed in ranch gear and Western hats emblazoned with the Lunos logo, they hit the bull’s horns as invitees and curious passers-by watched. Then he and the horse circled the statue, handing out cowboy hats and branded stress balls.
The goal was simple: deliver Lounos’ pitch of “taming the Wild West” of accounts in the most literal, public way attainable. The startup uses AI to automate invoicing, track balances, and keep track of payments.
“We were trying to figure out how we could stand out as a startup in a sea of sameness,” said Alex Mann, head of development at Lunos.
with more than 90,000 AI companies Around the world, many businesses promising to automate similar tasks in work and daily life are finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate themselves by their products alone, according to one tally. Many AI companies geared toward businesses rely on hype-laden messages delivered through predictable channels like trade shows, white papers, billboards, and digital ads. A live stunt in front of a Wall Street bull represents a departure that might seem strangely at odds with the traditional back-office software created by these companies.
The stunt reflects a broader shift among AI companies that are turning to provocative marketing to stand out in a crowded, capital-rich field. In 2025 alone, AI startups are projected to raise approximately $202.3 billion globally, up from $114 billion a year earlier. crunchbase. Digital ad spend for generative AI apps also exceeds $200 million in Q2 2025. sensor tower Shows data.
As standard claims about productivity and speed blur together, some startups are abandoning corporate messaging in favor of ostentation. And while these stunts are working, marketing experts say the change reflects an industry under increasing pressure.
Instigating Startups
Startups like Artisan AI, Cluly, and Friend have come under fire for ads that suggest their tools can replace human workers, help cheat in job interviews, or replace real friendships: critics say the decision amounts to distasteful messaging held up for “racebaiting.”
Wary of similar allegations, business-focused AI startups are experimenting with less controversial moves for a variety of reasons.
For Vireo, 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 near the horses holding a Vireo banner that read, “The stuff that drives pipelines.”
The aim was to attract the attention of founders and C-suite leaders at companies with 50 or more employees, Vireo’s target customers. Chen-Ran said such theatrics are rare in the B2B world, where companies sell products to other companies rather than consumers, giving the stunt an added novelty. However, the real goal was for conference attendees to take photos and share them on LinkedIn, thereby driving online engagement at the center of Vireo’s marketing strategy.
Chen-Ran said, “You don’t do stunts just for the sake of stunting.” “You do it for the LinkedIn posts and content it drives.”
While Virio leaned into spectacle, Personal AI, a small language model startup, used excitement as a visual metaphor for its core message.
In June, at the HubSpot AI Summit in San Francisco (a separate conference from HubSpot Inbound), Suman Kanuganti, CEO of Personal AI, walked on stage topless Wearing only gym shorts. Kanuganti started with the line “LLM is naked” on the screen behind him. He argued that the bigoted models powering ChatGPT and Gemini make users feel “exposed” and “vulnerable”. Personal AI, which allows businesses to create personalized AI models by training on their own documents, is the “missing gear,” he said. As he slowly dressed, each item of clothing, from the Arc’teryx jacket to his Salomon shoes, symbolized a layer of protection that he personally relied on. The point was to show that, just as people choose clothes from familiar brands, businesses should have access to AI systems built with transparent guardrails: privacy, security, and reliability.
Trapped in ‘land grabbing mentality’
Marketing experts say the rise of these tactics reflects the pressures facing enterprise AI startups in a rapidly expanding field.
Emily Hayward, co-founder and CEO of Red Antler, a marketing agency for startups, said founders feel trapped in a “land-grab mentality,” desperate to grab attention before rivals, even if the product is still maturing, as investors pour billions into AI firms.
“Few, if any, of these businesses are currently completing their final product vision,” Hayward said. “It’s really about making enough noise that people test you against the next guy, then as the technology evolves, they stick with you.”
Tom Goodwin, co-founder of business consultancy firm All We Have Is Now, takes a more cynical view. Goodwin says there is “a certain degree of desperation and urgency” behind many of these stunts. They argue that AI is disruptive, responsible for provocative and attention-grabbing marketing.
“These companies are scared that no one will pay attention to them,” Goodwin said.
He goes on to argue that some AI products are “somewhat lacking in ethics”, pointing to intellectual property theft, job displacement, and dismissal of human values. He says that in a media environment filled with fragmentation on social platforms and growing political theater, fear has become a marketing tool. Startups looking to capitalize on that anxiety are looking for one of the few reliable ways to get attention back.
While these startups insist that their tactics were strategic and effective in increasing sales, Virio, Personal AI, and Lunos say that fueling negative buzz just to get attention is not in line with their values.
It appears that a less inflammatory, more controlled version of stunt marketing is proving profitable, albeit with mixed results.
Vireo’s stunt did not unfold as planned. Very few people passed by, and the horses at the Moscone Center moved so fast that most people could not take good photographs. Still, Chen-Ran said the company created its own LinkedIn content from the event, generated more than 300 qualified website visitors and gained visibility after “countless” people recognized the team inside the conference, leading to calls with some potential clients.
At Personal AI, Kanugati said that his stage performance helped strengthen the company’s position and secure additional conference bookings, which led to some small client deals.
For Lunos, the impact was immediate. Thousands of people visited the site, a LinkedIn post about the Wall Street stunt received hundreds of likes and comments, and word-of-mouth referrals in CFO Slack groups increased, Mann said. In the three months after launch, Mann said inbound leads filled the sales pipeline with hundreds of qualified prospects. The promotion also brought a flood of job applications, including from McKinsey consultants looking for leadership roles in business operations.
Lunos now has paying customers, and the team says the quantity and quality of interest coming in has them confident they can convert even more initial leads into customers.
As Mann said, the stunt “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 subside.
