The Buzzword Confusion Index

Composite Confusion Score · 0 clear → 100 fog

78/100

▲ 6 pts vs. last week

Elevated. Everyone shipped an "agentic fabric" and nobody agreed on what a fabric is.

0 · plain English50100 · word salad

Term Velocitynew coinages / re-labels this wk

High

Samenessvendor claim overlap

91%

Definition Driftsame word, different meaning

7/10

AI-Washing Density"AI/agentic" per 100 words

6.4

The Buzzword Leaderboard

Stack-ranked by Confusion Contribution — a blend of how many vendors are shouting the term, how far its meaning drifts between them, and how little a buyer can verify it in a demo. Tap any row for the gloss, a real vendor line, and the translation. Higher = foggier.

The Sea of Sameness

The buyer's core complaint, in one grid: who claims what. Red = the vendor actively markets this capability. Amber = adjacent / partial claim. The more red in a column, the less that word helps you tell anyone apart.

On 6 of 6 headline themes, every major vendor makes some version of the same claim — . The words stop telling the buyer anything.

Movers of the Week

What's heating up in the messaging cycle, and what's quietly aging out.

▲ Rising

▼ Cooling

The Vendor Buzzword Offender Index

Which vendor leans hardest on the word salad? Each is scored 0–100 on a Buzzword Reliance Score (BRS) — how densely they pack buzzwords, how many they coin or rebrand, how thin the substance runs underneath, and how much they just echo everyone else. Higher = guiltier. Tap a vendor for the rap sheet. Ranks move week to week.

Component key: Density = buzzwords per 100 marketing words · Coinage = new terms + rebrands shipped this week · Substance gap = how far the claims outrun verifiable capability · Me-too echo = share of messaging that just repeats a rival's line.

How to run this every week

The Index is designed as a repeatable ritual, not a one-off. Each Friday, pull the week's vendor press releases, conference keynotes, product-page rewrites, and analyst notes, then score every term that appears on the four sub-metrics below. The composite is a weighted mean, clamped 0–100.

CCI = 100 × ( 0.30·Velocity + 0.30·Sameness + 0.25·DefinitionDrift + 0.15·AIWashing )

A term earns a spot on the leaderboard when its Confusion Contribution clears 55. New coinages get a NEW flag; a term drops off after two weeks below threshold. Rank moves (▲▼) compare against the prior issue.

Scoring rubric (click to expand)

Term Velocity (0–100): rate of new coinage + re-labeling of existing features. A vendor renaming last year's product counts double — that's pure noise, zero new capability.
Sameness (0–100): share of tracked vendors making the same claim in the same week. 6/6 = 100. This is the "everybody looks the same" metric.
Definition Drift (0–10, scaled): how far the term's meaning varies across vendors. "Fabric" means an architecture to one, a product SKU to another, an aspiration to a third.
AI-Washing Density (0–100, scaled): occurrences of "AI / agentic / autonomous" per 100 marketing words, discounted by how much verifiable capability sits underneath.

Vendor Buzzword Reliance Score (BRS) is scored per vendor, same cadence:

BRS = 100 × ( 0.35·Density + 0.20·Coinage + 0.30·SubstanceGap + 0.15·MeTooEcho )

Density: buzzwords per 100 words of that week's press releases, keynotes, and homepage copy.
Coinage: net-new terms or product rebrands the vendor shipped this week.
Substance gap: distance between what's claimed and what a buyer can actually verify in a POC — the honesty penalty.
Me-too echo: share of messaging that simply restates a competitor's framing ("us too, but woven").

Sources each week: vendor newsrooms (SailPoint, Okta, CyberArk, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, Microsoft Entra), Black Hat / RSAC / Fal.Con / Oktane / Navigate keynotes, earnings-call transcripts, and independent buyer surveys. Buyer-confusion inputs are anchored to published practitioner data, e.g. the finding that roughly two-thirds of CISOs say aggressive marketing makes real innovation hard to distinguish from AI-washing.