As AI capabilities converge, brand differentiation is shifting from features to feelings. In this op-ed, James Brooks, Founder and CEO of GlassView, examines the contrasting emotional strategies of Apple and Anthropic—aspiration versus anxiety—and argues that emotional engagement, not raw capability, will define the next era of tech competition.
As AI capabilities converge, companies like Apple and Anthropic are betting on different emotional strategies—aspiration versus anxiety—to influence user behaviour.
When John Ternus steps into the CEO role at Apple this September, he’ll be leading a company that is grappling with one of the most consequential technology shifts in history.
Walking into the big job, all eyes will be on Ternus to close Apple’s AI capability gap with Anthropic and Open AI. Anthropic’s forthcoming IPO, on track for this fall/winter, will bring even more industry heat and media attention on Apple’s next move.
But there’s another race to watch. The capability gap between leading AI systems is closing and that is shifting the competition away from what the technology can do towards how it makes people feel.
The Capability Plateau
For most of the past two decades, competitive advantage in tech was tangible. Better hardware, tighter software integration, faster chips, these were ownable and gave brands their edge.
AI is reshaping those dynamics with capabilities advancing in lockstep, but also converging into sameness. What differentiates one system today gets built into a competitor’s roadmap tomorrow. The intelligence underlying AI is becoming widely distributed.
In that environment, emotional engagement becomes the lasting differentiator, because it’s the one thing that is ownable and doesn’t go out of date in six-months.
Yet, most organisations treat emotion as an afterthought, something that is handled by brand teams after the core product decisions are made. But emotion runs through every interaction: how a system responds, how predictable it feels, how much confidence it creates in the person using it. Over time, those signals determine whether a user leans in, returns, or seeks an alternative.
Two Very Different Emotional Bets
Ternus, currently Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, is inheriting a company with a historically clear emotional signature. Apple’s strength was it superseded what its products did and enveloped customers in good feelings, secure in their purchase decision and feeling ahead of the crowd.
As the industry caught up to Apple’s innovation cycles, category-defining product innovation softened, and the emotional edge became less defined, too.
On the surface, appointing Ternus as CEO looks like a rational move, elevating a chip architect and doubling down on silicon. But look at the emotional output of his work.
The iWatch’s Emergency SOS and location tracking features were the basis of an Australian swimmer’s battle with a riptide in the spot “Rick’s Rescue,” one of the most affecting ads Apple has produced in years. Apple’s accessible tech features created life-changing access for people with disabilities.
Ternus’s product decisions generated some of Apple’s most emotionally resonant work of the last decade. If that instinct carries into the CEO role, the emotional story about Apple and AI will arrive before the feature pitch and reclaim the aspirational ground the brand was built on.
Anthropic is making a different emotional bet entirely. Its messaging consistently centers on safety, risk, and the long-term consequences of getting AI development wrong. This framing gets read as purely principled. It’s also a strategic choice with practical logic behind it.
Caution, used deliberately, focuses attention. It raises the stakes of the buying decision. In enterprise environments especially, where the perceived cost of a wrong choice is high, the company that positions itself as the careful, controlled option earns a meaningful credibility advantage. Anthropic isn’t asking users to feel inspired, it’s prompting them to feel that the alternative is risky.
Aspiration versus anxiety . Both are being executed with intention.
What Differentiation Looks Like Now
What’s worth paying attention to for executives in any industry is that neither Apple or Anthropic is leaving the emotional dimension of their product to chance. They’ve decided what response they want to create in users and are designing around it.
Most brands haven’t done that work. They can target, distribute, and optimise with precision. But the responses that happen when users actually use your product – the level of trust, hesitation, or confidence it creates – often go unmeasured. As technical differences between competing products continue to narrow, that becomes the decisive advantage.
The useful questions for any product leader right now aren’t about capabilities alone. They’re about whether a product is building trust or creating doubt, making decisions clearer or more opaque and whether customers will remain loyal to the brand because it’s dependable or because it feels good to use.
These metrics are harder to measure than feature parity. They’re also harder for a competitor to copy.
When Ternus takes over in September, the tech press will track every AI announcement out of Cupertino. The more revealing indicator will be the first marketing campaign that comes out of the Ternus era and whether it rests on a feeling or a feature list. That choice will say more about Apple’s competitive strategy than any product roadmap.
