When Lunos, an AI startup in New York City, was gearing up for launch, its founder and chief executive, Duncan Barrigan, and his team wanted to make a splash. So they shelled out $3,500 to do the unconventional: hire a horse and a cowboy to lasso the bull of Wall Street.
On a sweltering evening in late September, the cowboy galloped toward the iconic sculpture in lower Manhattan. Wearing ranch gear and a western hat stamped with the Lunos logo, he lassoed the bull’s horns as invitees and curious passersby watched. He and the horse then circled the statue, handing out cowboy hats and branded stress balls.
The goal was simple: deliver Lunos’s pitch of “taming the wild west” of accounts receivables in the most literal, public way possible. The startup uses AI to automate invoices, track balances and follow up on payments.
“We were trying to figure out in a sea of sameness how we could stand out as a startup to be reckoned with,” said Alex Mann, Lunos’s head of growth.
With more than 90,000 AI companies worldwide, according to one tally, many businesses promising to automate the same tasks across work and daily life are having increasing difficulty differentiating themselves by their products alone. Many AI companies geared towards businesses have relied on hype-filled messaging delivered through predictable channels like trade shows, white papers, billboards and digital ads. A live stunt in front of the Wall Street bull represents a departure in form that can feel oddly out of sync with the conventional back-office software these companies build.
The stunt reflects a broader shift among AI companies turning to provocative marketing to stand out in an overcrowded, capital-rich sector. In 2025 alone, AI startups raised roughly $202.3bn globally, up from $114bn the year before, according to Crunchbase. Digital ad spending for generative AI apps also surpassed $200m in Q2 2025, SensorTower data shows.
As standard claims about productivity and speed blur together, some startups are abandoning corporate messaging in favor of spectacle. And while these stunts appear to be working, marketing experts say the shift reflects an industry under mounting pressure.
Provoking startups
Startups such as Artisan AI, Cluely and Friend have provoked backlash for ads implying their tools could replace human workers, help cheat in job interviews or substitute for real friendships: decisions that critics say amount to distasteful messaging orchestrated for “ragebaiting”.
Wary of similar accusations, business-focused AI startups are experimenting with less controversial gimmicks for a range of reasons.
For Virio, 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 8am to 11am, co-founder Emmett Chen-Ran walked beside the horses holding a Virio banner reading “Content that drives pipeline.”
The aim was to catch the attention of founders and C-suite leaders at companies with 50 or more employees, Virio’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. The real goal, though, was for conference attenders to take photos and share them on LinkedIn, fueling the online engagement at the center of Virio’s marketing strategy.
“You don’t do the stunt for the stunt itself,” Chen-Ran said. “You do it for the LinkedIn posts and the content it drives.”
While Virio leaned into spectacle, Personal AI, a small language model startup, used provocation as a visual metaphor for its core message.
In June, at the HubSpot AI Summit (a separate conference from HubSpot Inbound) in San Francisco, Personal AI’s CEO, Suman Kanuganti, walked onstage topless wearing only gym shorts. Kanuganti opened with the line “LLMs are naked” splashed across the screen behind him. He argued that the large models powering ChatGPT and Gemini leave users feeling “exposed” and “insecure”. Personal AI, which allows businesses to create individuated AI models by training on their own documents, he said, is the “missing gear”. As he slowly dressed, each item of clothing, from the Arc’teryx jacket to his Salomon shoes, symbolized a layer of protection he personally trusted. The point was to show that, just as people select clothing from familiar brands, businesses should have access to AI systems built with transparent guardrails: privacy, safety and reliability.
Trapped in ‘land grab mentality’
Marketing experts say the rise of these tactics speaks to the pressure facing enterprise AI startups in a rapidly expanding sector.
Emily Heyward, co-founder and CEO of Red Antler, a marketing agency for startups, said founders feel trapped in a “land grab mentality” desperate to seize attention before a rival does, even if the product is still maturing, as investors pour billions into AI firms.
“Few, if any, of these businesses are currently delivering on their ultimate product vision,” Heyward said. “It’s really about drumming up enough noise that people try you versus the other guy, then stick with you as the tech evolves.”
Tom Goodwin, co-founder of All We Have Is Now, a business consulting firm, takes a more cynical view. Goodwin says there is “a degree of desperation and urgency” driving many of these stunts. AI is subversive, he argues, which lends itself to marketing that is provocative and attention-grabbing.
“These companies are terrified that no one’s going to notice them,” Goodwin said.
He goes further, arguing there is “a degree of lack of morality” embedded in some AI products, pointing to intellectual property theft, job displacement and the dismissal of human values. In a media environment splintered across social platforms and heightened political theater, fear, he says, becomes a marketing tool. Startups tapping into that anxiety are reaching for one of the few reliable ways to claw back attention.
While these startups insist their tactics were strategic and effective in driving sales, Virio, Personal AI and Lunos say stirring up negative discourse solely for attention does not align with their values.
The less inflammatory, more controlled version of stunt marketing appears to be paying off, though with mixed results.
Virio’s stunt did not unfold as planned. Few people walked by, and the horses at the Moscone Center moved too quickly for most people to capture good photos. 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 a few potential customers.
At Personal AI, Kanugati said his stage performance helped cement the company’s positioning and secure additional conference bookings, which have led to a handful of small customer deals.
For Lunos, the impact was immediate. Mann said thousands of people visited the site, LinkedIn posts about the Wall Street stunt drew hundreds of likes and comments, and word-of-mouth referrals spiked across CFO Slack groups. In the three months following the launch, Mann said inbound leads filled the sales pipeline with hundreds of qualified prospects. The publicity even triggered an influx of job applications, including McKinsey consultants seeking leadership roles across business operations.
Lunos now has paying customers, and the team says the volume and quality of inbound interest has left them confident they can convert even more early leads into clients.
As Mann put it, 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 fade.
