Technology brands keep showing us tomorrow. We’d like a little more help with today.
In the twentieth century, the silver-coated future came with a robot housekeeper. It cooked, cleaned and generally left us to enjoy being more decadently human. A life of endless leisure and consumption, while the machinery got on with the hard yards.
Somewhere among all that shiny chrome, the household budget went missing. Once the robot can do our job, we won’t be able to afford the robot. We risk becoming its housekeeper instead.
In today’s reality, there’s plenty to marvel at, but for all the ease these advances promise, they seem to bring more to learn, manage or run to keep up with. Progress can be a burden.
November’s Web Summit in Lisbon and Slush in Helsinki bring together technology founders, investors and business leaders to explore new ideas and build the companies behind them. They interest us because these are businesses shaping how we’ll work and live. And because across our work in B2B technology branding, we keep coming back to the same issue. Companies promise extraordinary difference but fall back on the same soulless, functional cues. The human story goes missing, leaving people who use the tech struggling to recognise their own lives in what’s being promised.
Electric everything
David Bowie sang “Blue, blue, electric blue is the colour of my room where I will live” in Sound and Vision. He could be describing the world technology companies want us all to live in.
Glowing grids. Floating data. Cold lighting. Important business conducted in rooms with no apparent daylight. It’s all very Tron meets techno rave. Some of us would quite like a window onto the real world.
These familiar codes are meant to signal technical sophistication. To me, they often convey a cold, stark world set on repeat. Cyber clones, that pretend to offer something different.
In Wynter’s June 2026 survey of 100 senior B2B SaaS marketing leaders who had recently evaluated vendors, 64% found them difficult to distinguish through their websites and messaging. People responsible for making brands stand out were struggling to tell other brands apart.
The pressure is familiar from the other side. In 3Thinkrs’ survey of 400 UK and US technology CMOs, 40% felt their marketing function lacked the skills, budget or resources to communicate a distinctive brand narrative.
The visual language of the future is starting to look awfully familiar. Worse, a brand can look impressively ahead of its time while making its audience feel left behind.
Productivity needs a human purpose
We seem to spend a growing part of the working day looking after the technology that’s supposed to look after us. Another dashboard to check, another notification to clear, another system requiring an update. Managing tools threatens to become a job within the job. Yet, “more productive” is usually waiting near the top of the page. A sensible business ambition. A rather thin description of modern life.
For someone worried about their job, it can sound like an instruction to become a more efficient component on a production line that suddenly acquired brighter lighting.
Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, surveying 31,000 knowledge workers across 31 markets, found 48% of employees said work felt chaotic and fragmented. That’s the working day into which the next supposedly effortless product arrives.
AI adds a particularly charged layer. Henley Business School’s 2026 survey of 2,900 UK full-time workers found 58% were optimistic about AI at work, while 61% felt overwhelmed by keeping up with its development. And 36% feared AI would replace their role. Enthusiasm, exhaustion and anxiety all occupy the same working world.
And lack of confidence has commercial consequences. The Bank of England’s July report expected weaker business confidence to weigh on investment intentions. The ONS still records a slowdown in UK productivity growth since 2008. These findings don’t establish technology as the cause, but they do give some context to the cheerful promises of greater output. Technology has not yet widely proved itself as a panacea for lagging productivity.
Looking inward for a moment, I’m enthusiastic about how we’re using AI at Dusted to deepen our work while making it more efficient. We want it to take on repetitive graft so we can spend more time on high-value creative and strategic thinking, and paying more attention to the people we work with and for. I want our technology to strengthen our team’s contribution and the pride they take in their work. A working life we can see ourselves in, with the tools helping us do more of what we’re good at.
As we look to embed technology in our workflows, it’s a conversation I regularly have with our creative director Paul Marten:
“AI is changing how we work at Dusted. For me, it’s a sounding board that gives imagination and instinct more room to play, helping us explore ideas, challenge our thinking and build on our experience. Yet technology brands rarely communicate this human benefit. They promise greater productivity, when the real value is freeing up time and attention for creativity. There’s a richer story to tell: how technology enables people to do more of what makes them human, giving their abilities more room to flourish.”
Humanising technology brands
Too often, technology brands bury that life beneath specifications and features. We learn plenty about the specifications and functionalities but remarkably little about what it means in the wider world.
I explored this at Infosecurity Europe and in our article The four tensions reshaping cybersecurity branding in the age of AI. Technical credibility matters, but so does showing what the technology means to the people whose lives it touches.
At Dusted, our “Built for now. Future ready.” promise begins with understanding the here and now. That’s why we developed our Humanising Technology workshop and framework, bringing the full human chain into brand development.
The buyer, the person implementing a system and the person living with its consequences may need very different things. A procurement presentation can be perfectly persuasive while leaving the people expected to use the technology quietly dreading Monday.
We begin with a diagnostic of the brand and its competitors, then explore the people around it, including teams, partners, operators and indirect beneficiaries. Real situations, from choosing and onboarding to support and problem resolution, help establish what people need to understand and feel.
After the workshop, Dusted develops a Human Expression Framework with a few clear visual and verbal principles. These inform brand character and creative direction, from imagery, colour and movement to language and tone. The findings can inform a new identity or refine an existing strategy, with guidance for websites, campaigns, sales and service communications.
Innovation needs a day job
Putting people back into the picture also gives “innovation” a day job. It must make a difference to someone, somewhere, beyond the product roadmap.
We have little patience for vague or esoteric claims. “Innovation” has become one of those words businesses feel obliged to use. It announces its importance, rarely explains itself and is even more rarely distinctly ownable.
Our innovation framework helps define what it means for that business, when it matters, to whom, why anyone should believe it and how it should be described and lived. Our work with two US clients shows how innovation can have very different human meanings.
Tech that takes the weight off
HERE makes an enterprise browser, a secure browser built for organisations that brings work applications and data into one connected workspace. Systems can share information, reducing the copying and constant switching between tools that HERE describes as “toggle tax”.
Its own commissioned survey of 1,000 US finance, healthcare and public-sector professionals found 48% said AI had made their jobs harder or created roughly as much work as it saved. Even help can need too much helping.
There’s relief in following a thought without losing it between tabs. Our work with HERE put that user perspective into a playful, characterful identity with the promise “Everything works right here”. Enterprise technology now speaks like someone who understands your day.
For Digitech EMS Billing, which supports ambulance revenue management in the US, the human stakes are sharper. Saving a life generates an administrative life of its own. Insurance cover and billing protections can vary greatly between states. The crew’s clinical record supports these claims for payment. Care has to be documented, then translated into billing.
Paramedics need to concentrate on saving lives, not complicated data entries. And patients surviving an emergency shouldn’t suffer a heart-stopping moment when they receive their share of the bill.
So, we helped put the value of fairness at the heart of Digitech’s human contribution. Fairness to crews, whose attention belongs with the patient. Fairness to patients, helping them pay only what they properly owe and understand clearly what’s happening.
Ambulance Commander is Digitech’s proprietary SaaS platform, developed to bring this complex work together. Yet its role had become buried among descriptions of individual software functions and components. It connects patient-care records with billing and finance systems, helping reduce repeated entry and paperwork. The patient portal makes balances and insurance activity visible, with straightforward ways to update details and make payments. Our brand refresh brought the platform forward within a streamlined architecture and sharpened its proposition, making its human contribution clearer.
For HERE, attention is precious. For Digitech, fairness is personal. Those are different foundations for building distinctive technology brands with deeper human meaning.
Let the daylight in
Orange once told us, “The future’s bright.” Its early advertising invited people to talk, laugh, listen and cry. Even to switch off. Tender moments of human life gave the promise its meaning.
Today, the view feels rather more crowded. More commanding. Everyone’s running to keep up with tomorrow, and it can be hard to see what’s getting better. Life feels more complicated. But technology can feel more hopeful when we can see how it fits into an ordinary day, makes something simpler and leaves us with more room to be ourselves.
Defining innovation gives a brand something specific to stand behind and brings it to life through brand activation. Humanising Technology reveals why that contribution matters in people’s lives, then gives it a visual and verbal character of its own that situates brands in the real world.
All this gives us a much more interesting starting point than yet another glowingly productive horizon.
Letting in some daylight reveals the life technology serves, giving people something they can recognise and want to be part of. The most compelling technology brands make being human feel more possible, here and now. More natural. More us.
Let the daylight in.
Explore our work for Digitech and HERE, or talk to Dusted about humanising your technology brand.
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