Aston Martin's Spanish driver Fernando Alonso leaves the pit during the third practice session ahead of the Formula One Japanese Grand Prix, March 28. Canadian AI company Cohere partnered with the team in March.TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP/Getty Images
Sometime in the coming days, new signage will be erected at a large exhibition hall in Ottawa. Previously known as EY Centre, the building has been rechristened the Cohere Centre, after Canadian artificial intelligence company Cohere Inc. purchased the naming rights.
The 220,000-square-feet of space for trade shows, conferences and concerts located by an Ottawa airport Hilton is not exactly the Crypto.com Arena, which is home to many Los Angeles professional sports teams. Upcoming events at the Cohere Centre, in contrast, include a liquidation sale and a fitness competition.
But Cohere’s deal in Ottawa is the latest effort from the cash-rich, profit-starved AI industry to boost awareness and score customers in a competitive market filled with hype.
Cohere has been busy in this regard. In February, it signed chess champion Magnus Carlsen as a brand ambassador to appear in campaigns, events and “thought leadership initiatives.” The following month, it struck a partnership with Aston Martin Aramco, the F1 racing team. As part of the arrangement, a Cohere logo will appear on the side of the chassis and front-wing mirrors of the team’s vehicles (CoreWeave Inc., an AI data centre company that works with Cohere, struck its own sponsorship deal with the racing team last year.)
Rivals including Anthropic and Google have arrangements with F1, as does AI search company Perplexity. Anthropic and OpenAI launched ads during this year’s Super Bowl, while cricket has recently attracted AI companies. OpenAI and Google (specifically its AI search mode) sponsor the women’s and men’s premier leagues in India, respectively. And AI company Legora, which makes tools for lawyers, put out a commercial in April featuring actor Jude Law (law, get it?) not long after it raised US$550-million.
'Attention is now the scarcest asset,' Scott Stevenson, CEO of legal AI company Spellbook, says.Johnny C.Y. Lam/The Globe and Mail
Compared with the billions of dollars some of these companies are spending on data centre capacity, marketing budgets are probably not a big concern. But when AI companies start slapping their names on race cars and recruiting Hollywood A-listers, that’s either a sign of confidence in their business models or some reckless exuberance at play. Or, possibly, a bit of both.
“Attention is now the scarcest asset,” said Scott Stevenson, chief executive officer of Canadian legal AI company Spellbook. “AI makes it easier to produce software, and easier to make content. Eyeballs are the limiting factor for everyone, and there is a massive race to get in front of them before competitors do.”
Cohere has a unique marketing challenge. Its larger competitors, such as Anthropic and OpenAI, have consumer-facing chatbots with huge brand awareness in addition to services for businesses and governments. Cohere has no consumer presence and sells to enterprise and public-sector clients. “It’s disadvantageous in terms of having our name out there,” said co-founder Nick Frosst. “We’re definitely being a little bolder with how we tell our story, and spending more on marketing as a result.”
He declined to share how much Cohere’s ad spending has grown, but characterized the approach as pragmatic. “There are lots of AI companies spending way, way, way more,” he said.
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Marketing blitzes are part of technology booms and busts, too. Dot-com companies such as Pets.com spent big on Super Bowl ads in 2000 before cratering, while internet service provider PSINet bought the naming rights to the stadium housing the Baltimore Ravens in 1999. Two years later, the company filed for bankruptcy.
Crypto companies started splashing money around a couple of decades later. One operation, DigitalBits, sponsored Inter Milan, the soccer club, in 2021 but stopped making payments as the value of its digital token collapsed. Crypto company Voyager Digital sponsored the the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks in 2021 before filing for bankruptcy the following year. Crypto.com’s US$700-million purchase of the naming rights to the former Staples Center in L.A. still stands, however.
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Now it is AI companies that are on the ascent. Some marketing efforts are more likely to bear fruit than others. There is a reason, for example, AI companies are flocking to F1 teams. Many are hoping the sport’s luxury image will rub off on their own brands, while science and design are integral to F1 – a match for AI companies that trade on the same attributes. “These brands get involved in F1 because of the association between engineering, data, analytics and human intelligence,” said Michael Naraine, an associate professor of sport management at Brock University.
In some cases, AI companies aren’t just looking to place their logos on things but to score business, as well. Cohere’s deal with Aston Martin Aramco was pitched as a partnership to “help accelerate AI innovation.” The team said it would integrate Cohere’s large language models for data analysis and use North, the company’s AI platform for automating office work. Mr. Frosst declined to comment on the financial terms of the deal and any revenue attached to it.
More generally, AI can be useful for F1, where cars are decked out with sensors that produce reams of data. Properly parsed, that information can help unlock performance gains to allow drivers to reach the finish line a split-second earlier. “It is almost impossible to get an overview of what is happening in all the different areas of the car in real-time without some form of big data model,” said Stephen Stuart, an associate professor in the faculty of human sciences at Saint Paul University in Ottawa.
The return on investment for these marketing initiatives is the big question. “They’ll pay lots of money to have their logos on cool things, but then what is the evaluation metric?” said Prof. Naraine. “For some brands, they feel obligated because some of their competitors are doing something.”
Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst. 'We’re definitely being a little bolder with how we tell our story.'Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
At Cohere, Mr. Frosst said the company is tracking brand awareness. Purchasing the naming rights for the Ottawa convention centre, for example, can help get Cohere on the minds of sundry government officials and business folk who fly in and out of the nation’s capital. The deal also comes before the Cohere Centre hosts a large security and defence conference later this month, a key market.
Chess, meanwhile, is entwined with the development of AI, particularly the moment in 1997 when IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue defeated world champion Garry Kasparov. The Cohere office is littered with chess boards and Mr. Frosst plays the game regularly, against opponents including Geoffrey Hinton, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2024 for his pioneering AI research.
The deal with Magnus Carlsen involves some ideological alignment. “We have a vision of how this technology can be empowering and sovereignty enabling that is unique to the industry, and I think Magnus really represents that,” Mr. Frosst said. “He’s a very individual, empowered guy.”
At Spellbook, Mr. Stevenson does not feel compelled to hire a name-brand actor, à la Legora. He’s found the best marketing strategy for Spellbook is word-of-mouth: making a product so good that customers will recommend it. That means investing in traditional marketing channels such as events, paid advertising and an outbound sales team. The company is planning to a launch a fellowship fund that will sponsor lawyers as part of a marketing effort, though Mr. Stevenson declined to share more details.
As for the big sponsorship deals and other marketing deals in AI, he’s not sure what it portends. “It’s incredibly hard to say what is par for the course,” he said. “We’ve never seen a technology adopted so quickly, and revenues grow so quickly. We are in uncharted territory.”