#human-machine-interaction

#human-machine-interaction

Picture this: you slide into your car, and instead of being greeted by cold, silent technology, there's a little spherical companion perched on your dashboard, ready to chat. That's TOOOONY, and it's rethinking what it means to have tech in your vehicle. At first glance, Toooony looks like it escaped from a Pixar film. It's got this perfectly round head with big, expressive eyes that light up on its circular screen, and honestly, you can't help but smile when you see it.

In the race to build brands around AI assistants, the stakes are higher than empathy. This week's debut brand marketing campaigns from OpenAI and Anthropic made that clear, and in retrospect, cast Perplexity's earlier campaign in a sharper light. These aren't brands trying to be relatable. They're trying to normalize a seismic shift in human-machine interaction. As Neil Barrie, co-founder and global CEO of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, put it: "All of them are building brands around weapons grade power."