The Complete Guide to Tech Marketing Buzzwords (1995–2025)

Tech marketing has always had a way with words – not in the Shakespearean sense, mind you, but in the sense of slinging around trendy jargon so frequently that entire games of buzzword bingo exist to humorously cope with it.

A buzzword, by definition, is a word or phrase that becomes ultra-fashionable and overused, often divorced from its original meaning, wielded less to clarify than to impress. From the dot-com boom of the mid-1990s to today’s obsession with all things AI, tech’s favorite vocabulary has evolved with the times – and often overstayed its welcome.

Picture a 90s boardroom with executives talking about “paradigm shifts” and “synergy” while junior staff secretly tick off bingo cards under the table. Flash forward to 2023, and swap in terms like “AI-powered” and “disruption” – the game remains the same, only the buzzwords have changed. In this guide, we’ll take a journey through the history of buzzwords in English-language tech marketing from 1995 to today, covering both the consumer gadgets that made us swoon and the enterprise software pitches that made us roll our eyes. We’ll see how buzzwords rise and fall, why marketers love them, and how they’ve been used (and abused) in campaigns by the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, OpenAI, and many more. Strap in for a witty, informative ride – by the end, you’ll be able to disrupt any conversation with your innovative insights into tech’s buzziest lingo (just kidding – please don’t do that).

Let’s dive in, and remember: if at any point you feel overwhelmed by jargon, just take a deep breath and circle back later. We’ll start at the height of the Clinton era, when cyberspace was new, and “information superhighway” actually sounded cool.

The Late 1990s: Cyberspace, Dot-Coms, and Paradigm Shifts

Welcome to the mid-to-late ’90s: the era of AOL free trial CDs, Windows 95, and the thrilling sound of a 56k modem dialing up. Tech was going mainstream, and with it came a tsunami of buzzwords. This was the age of “cyberspace” and the “information superhighway” – terms popularized by visionaries and politicians alike to describe the growing internet. The word cyber got tacked onto everything, from cybercafés to cybersex, lending a futurist sheen to otherwise mundane concepts.

In business circles, corporate-speak flourished: “synergy,” “mission-critical,” “paradigm shift,” and “out-of-the-box” thinking became the order of the day. These words were thrown around so much that they quickly went from powerful to parody. Synergy in particular became one of the most overworked buzzwords in business, essentially a cliché invoked to suggest that combining two things would magically produce a sum greater than its parts. By 1999, joking about overusing “synergy” was practically a sport among jaded dot-com workers (if you shouted “Synergy!” in a crowded office, you’d probably get showered in Nerf darts and stress balls).

Tech marketing in the late ’90s also embraced grandiose phrases like “the New Economy.” As startups flooded into Silicon Valley, optimists proclaimed that this New Economy was immune to the old rules – a notion that would die a fiery death by 2000. Still, in ’98–’99 it felt plausible: every business plan talked of “paradigm shifts,” “first-mover advantage,” and “building a Web portal” to capture internet eyeballs. Yes, eyeballs – as in, users viewing a website – became a key metric. In lieu of actual revenue, dot-coms bragged about how many eyeballs they were getting on their sites, with the assumption they’d monetize those eyeballs... eventually. A 1999 Washington Post piece even notes investors were using measures like “page views” and “unique visitors” as stand-ins for traditional finances, speaking earnestly of monetizing eyeballs. If that sounds absurd, well, it was. It was also peak 1999. This was the time when adding .com to your company name sent stock prices soaring overnight (and that would happen again two decades later with “.com” swapped for “blockchain,” but we’ll get there).

The dot-com era’s language grew so bloated with buzzwords that it inspired its own spoofs. Who could forget the classic Web Economy Bullshit Generator, a satirical web page that randomly fused jargon into phrases for your next press release? With one click you’d get gems like “synergize mission-critical paradigms” or “envision revolutionary e-business deliverables.” One fan raved that the generator let him “deploy innovative content” with one click. Another user joked, “imagine a world in which innovative front-end technologies ceaselessly synergize turn-key networks; it would be a paradigm shift...” That absurd sentence, a salad of every 90s buzzword in one, perfectly parodied the corporate drivel of the day – and, hilariously, didn’t sound far off from actual conference speeches.

In fact, the phenomenon of buzzword bingo was born in this era: bored meeting attendees would literally play bingo by crossing off jargon as executives uttered them, waiting eagerly for someone to say that winning word (perhaps “synergy” or “paradigm”) so they could silently fist-pump.

Amidst this jargon jamboree, major tech companies were as guilty as anyone in coining and propagating buzzwords. IBM, for example, decided to rebrand itself for the internet age by pushing the term “e-business.” In 1997, IBM launched a massive $500 million marketing campaign around e-business, effectively creating and popularizing that buzzword worldwide. The idea was to convince customers (and maybe IBM itself) that Big Blue could help anyone do real business on the web. The campaign’s ads – black-and-white vignettes of confused managers being enlightened that the Internet could actually make money – all hammered home e-business as the future. It worked: IBM got its groove back by positioning itself as the leader in this nebulous new category. E-business simply meant conducting business processes online, but phrasing it that way wouldn’t have sounded nearly as cool, would it? IBM understood the marketing magic of a good buzzword.

Microsoft, meanwhile, was less about inventing new buzzwords and more about fueling existing ones. In the ’90s, Bill Gates often spoke of an impending “information at your fingertips” world (one early vision for personal computing) and touted Windows as paving the way for a digital revolution. Microsoft’s marketing around Windows 95 famously declared, “Where do you want to go today?” – a tagline suggestive of limitless possibility, if not a specific buzzword. Still, Microsoft embraced talk of “integrated solutions,” “object-oriented” software, and the coming “Internet tidal wave” (a phrase from a Gates memo) in ways that left laypeople scratching their heads. By the late ’90s, the company and its enterprise rivals were deep in a jargon arms race over things like “client-server architecture” and “scalable enterprise frameworks.” The substantive ideas were real, but the phrasing often felt deliberately obtuse – tech marketing’s perennial tightrope between sounding advanced and actually explaining anything.

Of course, nothing out-buzzed the hundreds of internet startups mushrooming everywhere by 1999. Every pitch to VCs was peppered with grandiose terms: “frictionless commerce,” “first-mover advantage,” “scalable B2B solutions,” etc. Entrepreneurship itself got rebranded as “technopreneurship” in some circles. And if you didn’t work in tech, this all sounded like alien language.

Popular culture took notice. The 1999 film Office Space famously mocked banal corporate catchphrases (who can forget “Is this good for the company?”). And in Dilbert cartoons, the “Pointy-Haired Boss” would demand employees “think outside the box” or “leverage synergies” to hysterical effect. It was comedic because it was true – corporate-speak had run amok. Forbes even later described buzzwords as the “literary equivalent of Gresham’s law – they drive out good ideas.”

By 1995–1999, the tech world’s vocabulary was a stew of early internet jargon and age-old biz-school lingo. Everyone wanted to be seen as a visionary riding the next paradigm shift. Did two dudes in a garage manage to launch a website? Congrats – you were now disrupting the $500 billion Whatever industry (never mind if you had zero revenue). The word disruptive in fact began its journey to buzzword superstardom in this period: Harvard’s Clayton Christensen coined “disruptive innovation” in 1995–97 to describe how smaller companies upend incumbents, and by the end of the ’90s “disruptive” was already entering the business lexicon as a positive badge of honor. Over the next two decades, disrupt would become one of Silicon Valley’s favorite clichés – but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

To sum up the late ’90s: it was a cacophony of cyber-hype and business gibberish, an era when saying the right trendy words was almost as important as doing the right things. As one contemporary observer joked, “I spend most of my time at company meetings keeping notes of corpspeak and lingo, always looking out for new buzzwords.” If the words got too exhausting, well, one could always play another round of buzzword bingo or fire up the jargon generator for a laugh. Little did we know that this was only the opening act. The real buzzword barrage would come in the new millennium – after a brief pause when the bubble burst.

The Early 2000s: After the Dot-Com Bust – Innovation, Web 2.0, and “No Software”

When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, a lot of flashy buzzwords suddenly became punchlines. “B2C e-commerce portal” startups with no actual profits went belly-up, and talk of “New Economy” invincibility faded. In this more sober early-2000s climate, you might think tech marketing would tone things down. Haha, no. Instead, new buzzwords arose from the ashes, while survivors carefully repackaged the old ideas with fresh lingo. If 1999 was about “eyeballs” and “dot-coms,” by 2003 the hot terms were Web 2.0 and innovation.

First, let’s talk innovation. Of course innovation isn’t a new word – but in the 2000s it took on new life as the go-to praise for any product, company, or CEO. After Apple’s resurgence (more on that in a moment), innovation became the holy grail of tech marketing. Every press release boasted about an “innovative solution” or a company’s “culture of innovation.” The word was so overused that it basically lost any punch. By 2010, surveys of business jargon consistently found “innovative” among the top abused words. LinkedIn revealed that “innovative” was the second most overused descriptor in U.S. professional profiles of that year. So not only were companies calling themselves innovative, everyone on LinkedIn was personally claiming to be an innovative something.

The corporate world started to catch on that innovation had become a vacant cliché. In a 2017 industry interview, one executive admitted: “The term ‘innovation’ has become an overused buzzword, too often deployed as a marketing catch-phrase, its meaning obscured and diluted.” When even the innovators are saying the i-word is meaningless, you know it’s been beaten to death. But in the early 2000s, that self-awareness wasn’t there yet – innovation talk was everywhere, unironically.

Amid this renewal, Apple stood out for its masterful (and occasionally cringe-inducing) use of buzzwords in consumer tech. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he launched the famous “Think Different” campaign – a slogan, not a buzzword, but one that set the tone for Apple’s marketing as visionary and rebellious. Then came the parade of product launches where Jobs’s flair for language truly shone. He didn’t just call the iMac, iPod, or iPhone good; they were “revolutionary,” “incredible,” “magical,” even “insanely great.” Jobs had a penchant for over-the-top superlatives, but somehow sounded sincere. An observer noted that Jobs’s keynotes made liberal use of what came to be called “Steve-isms,” and that he “had a way of using over-the-top superlatives that sounded like they were motivated by pure excitement, not mere hucksterism.”

Apple marketing in the 2000s thus gave us some of the most memorable buzzwords in product history. The original iPhone in 2007 was billed as “a revolutionary and magical product” – yes, Apple actually used the word magical in a product description. It worked because fans felt it too. Now, if every company called their gadget magical, we’d laugh them out of town, but Apple got away with it and set a template: from then on, tech ads would overuse adjectives like “amazing,” “incredible,” and “innovative.” Count how many times an Apple press release says “the most advanced [X] we’ve ever made” – it’s a lot.

While Apple was busy “innovating” in consumer tech, the enterprise world was coining buzzwords of its own. Perhaps the most significant was Web 2.0. In 2004, publisher Tim O’Reilly popularized Web 2.0 to describe the post-dot-com internet – one characterized by user-generated content, social media, interactivity, and rich web applications. The term actually first cropped up around 1999, but it took off after the Web 2.0 Conference in 2004. Suddenly, everyone was talking about “the Web 2.0 era” – a slightly nebulous concept, but hugely influential as a buzzword.

Web 2.0 encompassed blogs, wikis, MySpace (oh, MySpace), Flickr, YouTube – the new generation of services that were dynamic and social, not static brochure websites. Marketers piggybacked on this hype: any product that could be painted with a social or participatory brush proudly did so. Enterprise software companies started dropping references to “Web 2.0 functionality” in their offerings. The irony, of course, is that by the time the mainstream business world was touting its Web 2.0-ness (circa 2007), the actual cool kids were moving on to something else.

One amusing sub-buzzword of this era was the “2.0” suffix itself. Web 2.0’s popularity bred countless copycats. Suddenly we had Enterprise 2.0 (applying social tools to corporate collaboration), Office 2.0, Library 2.0, you name it. Slapping “2.0” on an old concept became the quickest way to sound cutting-edge in the mid-2000s. It was a linguistic fad that now instantly dates anything that uses it.

Meanwhile, enterprise tech firms pushed some other choice terms. SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) was a big buzz-phrase around 2003–2006 in the IT middleware space – vendors like IBM and BEA loved bragging about their SOA-based solutions, promising businesses greater “agility” (another buzzword standby). But arguably a bigger shift in enterprise marketing was the rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and “the cloud,” which we’ll examine in a moment (as it really took flight in the late 2000s).

We can’t leave the early 2000s without talking about Salesforce.com – not just for its technology, but for its brash marketing. In 1999, Marc Benioff founded Salesforce with a then-radical idea: deliver enterprise software (CRM) entirely via the web, no on-premise installs. To sell this concept, Salesforce declared “The End of Software.” Literally, that was their marketing slogan. In 2000, Benioff staged a theatrical campaign around the notion of “no software” – complete with a red Ø symbol over the word “software” as their logo.

It was cheeky and a bit tongue-in-cheek (obviously Salesforce was software – just running on someone else’s server – but the point was the customer didn’t have to manage it). This guerrilla marketing included crashing a Siebel (competitor) conference with picketers wearing “NO SOFTWARE” signs. Salesforce was effectively turning “Software as a Service” into a buzzword by framing traditional software as obsolete. Their bold messaging helped coin the term “cloud CRM” and establish cloud computing in the business psyche.

It was controversial at first – rivals sneered that “the cloud” was just a buzzword – but it stuck. Salesforce’s early marketing stunts are legendary in tech circles, and they set the stage for cloud to become perhaps the defining tech buzzword of the next decade.

Before we move on, let’s check in on the public’s attitude toward buzzwords in this era. Around 2005, people definitely knew there was a lot of BS in business language, but the full backlash was yet to come. Terms like “synergy” and “thinking outside the box” were fodder for jokes on The Office and Dilbert, but newer tech terms like Web 2.0 were still used earnestly.

However, as early as 2004 we see satire popping up – the buzzword bingo game we discussed was one, and sites like BuzzWhack.com gave out “Buzzword of the Day” mock awards. The general sentiment: these words can be helpful if used sparingly and sincerely, but they often become crutches masking a lack of substance. As Investopedia put it: “At best, a buzzword can be a quick, pithy way to convey a complex idea. At worst, it’s a vague cliché to disguise a lack of new ideas.”

Early 2000s tech marketing unfortunately leaned toward the latter category at times, but hey, new ideas were genuinely scarce right after the bust – maybe buzzwords filled the void until real innovation ramped up again.

The Late 2000s: There’s an App for That – Mobile, Cloud, and Big Data

By the late 2000s, tech was roaring back. Google, Amazon, and others that survived the bust were now giants. Facebook was ascendant. The iPhone (2007) ignited the mobile computing revolution. With these rapid changes came a whole new crop of buzzwords in both consumer and enterprise domains – some of which remain powerhouses today.

First, let’s talk about the cloud. If you had to pick one buzzword that defines late 2000s/early 2010s enterprise tech marketing, cloud is it. The term “cloud computing” existed earlier (it was used in academic and tech circles in the mid-2000s), but it hit mainstream marketing around 2008–2010. Suddenly every tech vendor was pivoting to the cloud. In simple terms, cloud computing meant using online services running on remote servers – but saying “on the Internet” wasn’t sexy enough. Calling it “in the cloud” evoked a kind of fluffy magic: your stuff is just… out there, accessible anywhere.

It became one of those buzzwords that got applied to everything, even when it didn’t quite fit. Traditional software companies rebranded their products as “cloud-enabled” or launched dubious “private cloud” offerings (basically data center rebrands) to ride the hype. This led to some serious eye-rolling from tech veterans.

Oracle’s famously outspoken CEO Larry Ellison mocked cloud fever in 2011, ranting: “The computer industry is the only industry more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is cloud? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?” He pointed out that much of what was being marketed as cloud was stuff companies had already been doing (hosted servers, etc.) with new wording. “All it is, is a computer attached to a network,” Ellison quipped, blasting venture capitalist “nitwits” for hyping it up.

Of course, a couple years later, even Oracle had to bow to the trend and embrace cloud terminology – Ellison begrudgingly admitted Oracle would “change the wording of some of our ads” to include cloud. The buzzword had won.

One company that undeniably helped push cloud into the lexicon was Amazon. In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched S3 and EC2, pioneering rentable computing infrastructure. At first, Amazon didn’t aggressively market it with fluff; they targeted developers. But as AWS grew, Amazon and others began evangelizing “cloud” benefits: elasticity, scalability, pay-as-you-go – all delicious buzz-concepts in their own right. By 2008, cloud computing was such a fad that tech magazines ran cover stories like “What is the Cloud?” and everyone from IBM to startups claimed cloud bona fides.

The buzzword lifecycle was in full swing: early confusion (what is it?), then enthusiastic adoption, then skepticism and satire. By 2010, jokes abounded that “cloud is just someone else’s computer,” puncturing the mystique. Still, the term stuck and is now just a normal part of IT vocabulary – a fate that many buzzwords aspire to (becoming ordinary and accepted, no longer eye-roll-inducing).

Next, consider the mobile boom and its catchphrases. With the iPhone’s launch and Android’s rise (late 2000s), “mobile” became the new frontier. Marketers chanted “There’s an app for that” (Apple’s slogan in 2009) as a sort of cultural meme. The word app itself, short for application, went from tech jargon to household term overnight thanks to smartphone App Stores. Every company suddenly needed an “app” strategy.

We started to hear terms like mobile-first – the idea (championed around 2010) that new services should be designed for mobile before desktop. Even Google announced in 2010 it would pursue a mobile-first outlook. This phrase became a mini-buzzword in its own right, signaling you were forward-thinking if you put the smartphone experience above all. Naturally, once everyone was doing it, mobile-first lost its edge and now it’s just assumed.

Another big concept: ecosystems. As Apple built a seamless lineup of iPod, iPhone, Mac, etc., and as Microsoft, Google and others built their own product suites, marketing began heavily using the term ecosystem to describe the virtuous cycle of devices, software, and services locking customers in. “Join our ecosystem” sounds a lot friendlier than “we’ll get you dependent on our platform.” By the 2010s, even enterprise vendors talked about “ecosystems of partners and developers.” It’s a buzzword that became so standard, we forget it was once jargon. But it was part of the trend of the late 2000s: tech companies positioning themselves not just as sellers of products, but as creators of whole worlds you inhabit.

And then there was Big Data. Around 2008–2009, as companies amassed ever-larger datasets, someone coined “Big Data” to describe not just the data itself but the emerging field of analyzing extremely large, complex data sets for insights. By early 2010s, Big Data was the it buzzword. It promised that with enough data (and the right analytics tools), businesses could unlock game-changing insights, predict customer behavior, cure disease, you name it.

Tech marketers sold database software, storage, and analytics platforms under the Big Data banner. IBM, for one, ran extensive marketing on Big Data as part of its “Smarter Planet” initiative circa 2008–2010 – implying that harnessing Big Data would let us optimize everything from traffic to healthcare.

As with any huge buzzword, backlash followed. People started pointing out that big data was often just “lots of data,” and that more data didn’t automatically mean better decisions. By 2015, there was open cynicism. A writer for SiliconAngle quipped: “Big data is a buzzword lately and, like a lot of buzzwords, it gets used so often and so incorrectly that it’s lost all meaning.”

He even cited a now-famous snarky quote: “Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it too.” That tongue-in-cheek analogy went viral because it rang true – companies were touting big data projects even if they were just hoarding logs with no idea how to analyze them.

A Twitter bot even emerged that replaced “big data” with “chronic farting” in tweets, purely to ridicule how absurd the Big Data hype had become. (Example: a real tweet saying “Big Data is transforming marketing” would be regurgitated as “Chronic farting is transforming marketing.”)

In short, Big Data became a victim of its own success as a buzzword – so omnipresent by the early 2010s that it turned into a punchline. Yet, the core idea (using large datasets effectively) was and remains important, which is a hallmark of many buzzwords: behind the overselling, there usually is a real concept that’s simply been mangled.

This period also witnessed the rise of analytics and business intelligence (BI) as hot terms (often adjacent to Big Data). Every software seemed to add an Analytics module or tout “actionable insights.” And data science became one of the sexiest job titles around, which further fueled buzzword-y conversations in marketing pitches: “Our product leverages machine learning and advanced data science to deliver real-time analytics from big data.” That sentence just about checks all the 2010 buzzword boxes, doesn’t it?

We’d be remiss not to mention Microsoft in this era. After missing the early beat on mobile, Microsoft under new CEO Satya Nadella (from 2014) aggressively repositioned itself as a cloud-forward company. Nadella’s famous mantra was “cloud-first, mobile-first”. A curious phrase given two things can’t logically both be “first,” but the idea was that Microsoft would prioritize cloud services and mobile experiences in tandem.

Cloud-first became a modest buzzword in its own right, adopted by others to signal their modern approach. Microsoft also jumped on the budding AI train early, weaving terms like “machine learning” and “chatbot” into its 2010s marketing (remember Tay, the Twitter chatbot that went awry? Perhaps best forgotten). But the real AI buzz would come a bit later – which brings us to…

The Early-to-Mid 2010s: Disruption, IoT, and Digital Transformation

As we moved into the 2010s, a few big-picture buzzwords took center stage. Disruption – that concept introduced in the ’90s – fully blossomed into a Silicon Valley cliché. If you were a startup founder in 2013 and you weren’t claiming to disrupt something, were you even a startup? The narrative of the scrappy tech upstart toppling stodgy incumbents became the default framing of every new app or platform.

Venture capital pitch decks practically auto-filled the sentence: “We’re going to disrupt the [X] industry.” Ridesharing? Disrupted. Hotels? Disrupted by Airbnb. Television? Disrupted by Netflix. Sometimes the word “revolutionize” stood in, but “disrupt” was the favorite because it sounded slightly menacing and cool.

The overuse reached a point where commentators started calling it out. “Using ‘disrupt’ doesn’t mean you are truly disrupting anything. When every startup claims to be disrupting an industry, it becomes a cliché rather than a meaningful term,” one observer noted. In other words, talk is cheap – you need receipts to prove you actually upheaved an industry.

Nevertheless, the mythos of disruption was a huge marketing tool: it attracted press and investors. Even big companies tried to paint themselves as disruptors (or at least “agile” and not about to be disrupted). By the mid-2010s, disrupt had fully transitioned from academic term to buzzword to, arguably, parody of a buzzword – with HBO’s satire Silicon Valley immortalizing it in comedic fashion: “We’re not just gonna disrupt, we’re gonna disrupt the disruptors!”

Another heavyweight term of the 2010s: digital transformation. Unlike some buzzwords that bubble up from slang or specific products, digital transformation was a top-down, consultant-driven buzzphrase. It emerged as businesses realized they had to modernize for the digital age or risk dying. By the mid-2010s, every legacy corporation’s boardroom was abuzz about “our digital transformation journey.”

It was deliberately broad – essentially meaning “leveraging digital tech to fundamentally change how you operate and deliver value” – and that vagueness made it catnip for marketers and consultants. They could slot anything under it: moving to cloud software, adopting mobile apps, using data analytics, embracing e-commerce, etc.

As a result, the phrase was hammered into oblivion by overuse. CIOs started groaning whenever they heard it. A 2018 review in TechRepublic noted: “Digital transformation is a buzzword that increasingly falls in the category of being painfully overused – some CIOs even refer to it as ‘cringeworthy’.” If synergy was the cringey buzzword of the ’90s, digital transformation earned that title by 2020.

It got to the point where people joked that simply buying iPads for your field workers was “digital transformation.” Like many such terms, it’s not that the concept is invalid – companies do need to reinvent for the digital era – but the label was slapped on so liberally that it lost precision. One CIO.com piece quipped, “the term has undoubtedly reached buzzword status, to the point where it has lost its true meaning and become surrounded by misconceptions.”

Sound familiar? It’s the life cycle of a buzzword: useful shorthand → trendy mantra → ambiguous cliché → annoying buzzword → (eventually) just background noise.

In the consumer realm of the 2010s, we saw the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT). Suddenly every device was getting a chip and a Wi-Fi connection. Refrigerators, thermostats, light bulbs – all becoming “smart” [something].

The buzzword here was “smart” itself. The word smart had a straightforward meaning originally, but tech marketers co-opted it to mean “connected and somewhat autonomous.” A smartphone was obvious, but soon we had smart homes filled with smart locks, smart speakers, smart toothbrushes (yes, those exist, sadly).

Smart became one of those prefixes like “e-” or “i-” from earlier eras – a shorthand that signaled “this thing is high-tech and modern.” By the late 2010s, the joke was that “smart” gadgets were sometimes not very smart at all, and often created “dumb” security risks.

But the marketing worked: consumers really did perceive smart X as better. It’s a testament to how a buzzword can reshape language; now if a device is not Internet-connected, we explicitly say it’s “dumb” or “analog,” which would’ve sounded odd in 2000.

IoT as a term was widely used in industry by the mid-2010s to talk about this network of smart devices. Networking companies like Cisco loved painting visions of trillions of sensors enabling smart cities and smart factories. IoT itself, while a bit jargony, became a fairly standard term. It hasn’t quite reached the layman familiarity of cloud or AI, but it was definitely a buzzword that dominated many a keynote speech at tech conferences circa 2014.

Let’s not forget DevOps and Agile – buzzwords more confined to the software development community, but which leaked into broader tech business talk. Agile (methodologies) had started in 2001 as a revolution against heavy software processes, and by the 2010s it was mainstream. So naturally everyone started claiming they were “agile.”

It went from meaning something specific (iterative, customer-focused development) to being a fuzzy synonym for “fast and flexible,” applied in contexts far beyond software. “Our marketing team is now agile!” (Meaning… they do work in short sprints? Or they stand up and do daily Scrums? Who knows.)

As agile became diluted, it ironically became less effective at distinguishing anything – a common fate for buzzwords. DevOps, similarly, started as an important cultural movement (dev and IT operations collaborating), but soon every product that could remotely tie in called itself a DevOps tool. Companies boasted about adopting DevOps culture in press releases. So even engineering-centric terms aren’t safe from buzzwordification once MBAs get involved.

One more mid-2010s buzz-blitz came with the craze for “Uber-for-X” or “the [industry] of [other industry]” analogies. While not a single word, this was a trope: startups would pitch themselves as “It’s like Uber, but for laundry” or “the YouTube of enterprise training,” etc.

It became such a formula that by 2015, investors were groaning whenever they heard it. Founders clung to the formula because invoking a known disruptor’s name was a quick way to convey their model. It was buzzword-by-reference. Effective early on, it became eyeroll material once everyone used it.

By the end of the 2010s, the buzzword hall of fame had many new inductees: disruption, innovation, digital transformation, ecosystem, IoT, agile, and so on. Some of these, like innovation, were so beaten to death that people started to actively ban them in resumes or conference talks.

LinkedIn’s annual list of overused profile buzzwords continued through the 2010s – with “specialized,” “leadership,” “focused,” “strategic,” and of course “innovative” always at the top. It got to a point where saying “we’re innovative” in a job description or ad made audiences reflexively skeptical.

As one commentator summed it up: “There is no longer anything ‘authentic’ about using the word authentic.” Buzzword burnout is real.

But fear not – as the 2020s dawned, a new set of buzzwords was waiting in the wings to refresh our vocab and our hype cycles. From the metaverse to machine learning, let’s explore the latest lingo lighting up marketing slides.

The Late 2010s to 2020s: Blockchain, Metaverse, and the AI Everything Era

If you thought earlier buzzwords were big, the late 2010s brought BLOCKCHAIN in all caps, and the early 2020s shouted AI from the rooftops. Tech marketing went on a rollercoaster: from the crypto frenzy to the metaverse mirage to the AI gold rush, each with its own overhyped terminology.

Let’s start with the blockchain and cryptocurrency mania around 2017. As Bitcoin soared in value, suddenly blockchain was the coolest (and most confusing) word in tech. Originally describing the distributed ledger tech underpinning crypto, blockchain was soon peddled as a solution to everything. Startups pitched blockchain for supply chains, voting, dating apps – you name it.

Established companies felt pressure to show they were hip to the trend. In an almost comical replay of the dot-com naming gimmick, we saw a beverage company (Long Island Iced Tea Corp) literally rename itself Long Blockchain Corp in December 2017 – and its stock shot up nearly 300% in one day. The rebranding press release basically said, “we might do some blockchain stuff, we’re evaluating opportunities,” and investors went gaga.

A market analyst noted this was exactly like the late-90s dot-com era, where adding a trendy term could wildly inflate a stock’s perceived value. Indeed, a furniture company did the same pivot-to-blockchain and got a bump, a biotech renamed to Riot Blockchain and soared 400%. Talk about buzzword economics – the mere mention of the word acted like magic pixie dust.

Of course, most of these moves ended in tears (Long Blockchain eventually got delisted). But for a hot moment, blockchain was the buzzword to drop. Never mind that few could explain it beyond “a kind of distributed database, trustless, blah blah”; marketing materials were filled with vague promises of “leveraging blockchain technology to revolutionize [insert industry].”

Closely tied to crypto was the concept of Web3. Around 2021, enthusiasts rebranded the decentralized internet vision (blockchain-based apps, user-owned data) as Web3 – implicitly framing it as the next phase after Web 2.0. It quickly became a buzzy umbrella term. Venture capital firms started touting their Web3 portfolios. Twitter bio after Twitter bio suddenly read “Web3 believer” or “Building the Web3 metaverse” – mixing two buzzwords for the price of one.

To skeptics, Web3 often just meant “crypto stuff we’re trying to make sound mainstream.” Nonetheless, it gained enough traction that even major companies felt compelled to have a Web3 story or at least drop the term to signal trendiness. The jury is out on whether Web3 will mature into a standard concept or fade if the crypto hype doesn’t fully pan out. But as a marketing term, it certainly had its moment.

Then came the Metaverse. If you were online in late 2021, you could not escape that word. When Facebook rebranded to Meta and announced its focus on building the metaverse, it kicked off an arms race of metaverse mentions. Suddenly every company, from Microsoft to Walmart, was talking about their metaverse strategy.

What is the metaverse? Depends whom you ask, but broadly a persistent immersive virtual world, often accessed via VR/AR – like a grander vision of Second Life or Roblox. The key is: it didn’t actually exist yet in the form being hyped. That didn’t stop marketing from going into overdrive. We had “metaverse-ready” products, companies filing patents for virtual goods, agencies appointing Chief Metaverse Officers (yes, really). It was peak bandwagon buzzword behavior.

By 2022, however, a palpable metaverse fatigue set in. Reality (the real reality, not virtual reality) under-delivered; VR headset sales were lukewarm, and Meta’s own Horizon Worlds flopped with users. The media started publishing critical takes: is metaverse just an overblown buzzword? Many decided yes – at least for now.

It joined the pantheon of terms that exploded in hype almost overnight and then receded when people realized the emperor had no clothes (or rather, the avatar had no legs – a little metaverse humor there). Still, elements of the metaverse vision live on in ongoing AR/VR development. The term may be down, but not fully out.

If one buzzword could dwarf even the metaverse hype, it is AI. Artificial Intelligence as a concept has been around for decades, but the buzz around “AI” waxes and wanes. In the 1980s it was a buzzword, then again in mid-2010s with the deep learning revolution (when “machine learning” and “AI” started popping up in product pitches constantly). But nothing compares to the hype of the early 2020s.

Thanks to breakthroughs in generative AI (like OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022), “AI-powered” became the ultimate marketing must-have phrase. By 2023, if your product didn’t have some AI angle, you felt left out. Tech companies large and small began slapping “AI” onto everything – sometimes legitimately (genuine machine learning under the hood), but often tenuously.

We saw a repeat of the cloud and blockchain pattern: AI washing, some call it, where companies rebrand old features as “AI-driven insights” or “AI-powered automation” without much substance change.

The result: AI as a term started to suffer from inflation. “AI, in general, is used to describe pretty much any automation feature today,” one industry CEO lamented. He pointed out that a product doing a simple automated task gets marketed as “AI-powered” just because it sounds cool, even if there’s no real intelligence behind it.

By 2018, a survey of experts at a health tech conference found AI was already the most mentioned (and most tiresome) buzzword, more cited than even “blockchain,” which is saying something. And that was before the generative AI boom!

Fast-forward to 2024: a tech industry survey crowned “AI” as the number one most annoying business buzzword of the year. The word became so omnipresent – saturated in media, in every startup pitch, in every earnings call of Fortune 500 companies – that a fatigue set in. People started joking that slapping “AI” in your deck magically adds a zero to your valuation.

Which, like with blockchain, had some truth to it: stock prices of any public company that announced an AI angle tended to jump in the exuberant market of early 2023.

The OpenAI and Anthropic era is particularly interesting in buzzword terms. These companies, at the cutting edge of AI research, also strategically employ certain language to shape their narratives. OpenAI’s mission statement reads: “Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” That introduces the big buzz-phrase artificial general intelligence (AGI) into the public sphere.

Not long ago, AGI was a niche term; OpenAI made it mainstream by constantly talking about it – as something to strive for but also to handle carefully. Words like “safety,” “alignment,” and “ethics” accompany their AI discussions, which, cynically viewed, also function as reassuring buzzwords to preempt backlash about scary AI.

Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI folks, literally brands itself as “an AI safety and research company.” On their homepage they highlight building AI systems that are “reliable, interpretable, and steerable.” Those terms – reliability, interpretability, etc. – are important technical goals, but in marketing copy they also serve to differentiate Anthropic as the “good AI guys.”

In an industry racing ahead, “AI safety” has itself become a buzz-phrase (one with substance, but also wielded in PR). It’s interesting to see new buzzwords like “Constitutional AI” (Anthropic’s term for their AI training technique aimed at aligning with human values) and “Copilot” (originally GitHub Copilot for coding, now Microsoft’s brand for AI assistants in Office and beyond) entering the lexicon.

Everyone and their uncle are now launching some “AI Copilot” for something – riding on Microsoft’s coining of Copilot as a friendly term for AI helper. So we’re in a meta-buzzword situation: companies are coining branded buzzwords (Copilot, Generative Fill, etc.) on top of the generic buzzword (AI) to stand out.

One might wonder, why do we keep falling for it? Why do buzzwords keep cycling? It seems each new wave of tech brings genuine innovations, and along with them, new terminology. Early on, the terminology is useful shorthand (or at least excites early adopters). But then marketers amplify it far and wide, competitors jump in, everyone feels the need to use the same trendy words – and soon enough the words become hollow.

As one writer noted, “No industry loves to coin and use buzzwords more than tech. Part of the culture is throwing around new terms. While many are helpful, they also get painfully overused. Overused terms become misused, misunderstood, and poorly defined – eventually becoming at best meaningless, at worst sources of confusion.”

That pretty much sums it up.

Before concluding, let’s briefly check on some 2020s buzzwords outside of AI and crypto. 5G was huge in telecom marketing around 2019–2021 – carriers fell over themselves to tout 5G (sometimes even fake “5GE” icons) as a revolution. It’s now just the normal network, but the hype was intense for a while.

Edge computing became a term as well – sort of the stepchild of cloud, meaning computing at the edge of the network (like on devices or local data centers). It’s popular in IoT contexts. Not a household buzzword, but big in enterprise by 2020.

Quantum computing also flirted with buzzword status; lots of noise about quantum supremacy and how encryption would be rendered obsolete – companies like IBM and Google made real strides, but for marketing, quantum was often used as an intrigue word to sound futuristic, even though practical impact remains distant.

And we’d be remiss not to mention DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) in the corporate realm – by the mid-2020s it became common for tech firms to highlight their DEI efforts. While not a tech product term, it arguably became a buzzword in corporate communications (to the point some skeptics feel it’s used more in PR than substantive action – which is exactly how a meaningful concept can become buzzword-ified).

Now, as we write in 2025, the hottest terms in tech marketing are indeed all about AI – with a side of sustainability (as companies emphasize green tech) and perhaps XR (extended reality) as AR/VR keeps chugging. Will these terms become cringe buzzwords in a few years? Probably some will. It’s a cycle.

Already, people joke about AI: one LinkedIn post exclaimed “‘AI’ is officially the buzzword I got tired of hearing about in 2023.” Another 2024 survey ranked it the most annoying business cliché. Some things never change.