Taste is taking over Silicon Valley

Anthropic opened a pop up coffee shop in New York, handing out merchandise. Apple launched a cinematic film showing the handmade craft behind the MacBook Neo. Zuckerberg took a front row seat at Prada in Milan. These are not random acts of marketing or depictions of taste that build parallels to executive‘s work. They are signals of a much deeper shift in how technology companies understand their relationship with their customers.

Silicon Valley is trying to become a cultural force, borrowing the playbook from an industry that has been doing this for over a century. Luxury brands figured out long ago that a product is only one part of what you are selling. The other part is a world. Hermès does not sell bags. It sells the idea of a life lived with discernment and permanence. LVMH has spent decades building 360 degree touchpoints around its customers, from retail environments to cultural sponsorships to collaborations with artists. Every interaction reinforces the same feeling. That feeling is the brand.

Tech is starting to understand that the same logic applies to software. When capability is commoditized and AI makes good enough tooling available to almost anyone, the question shifts from what does this do to what does this say about the people who use it. AI products carry a specific cultural weight. They feel cold, automated and threatening to the things people value about their own judgment.

Borrowing the aesthetics of fashion and craft closes that distance. It says this tool is not here to replace your judgment. It is here to extend it. This luxury vocabulary now lives in software too: in latency, in word choice, in the fluency of an interface, in what a product chooses not to do.

Anthropic is already applying luxury strategy at the level of the model itself. Claude is trained to communicate with a tone that feels warm, considered and unhurried. Every response is crafted to feel like it came from someone who has genuinely thought about what you asked. That is not a technical default. It is a deliberate positioning decision, the same one a luxury house makes when it decides how its staff speak to customers, what words they use and what they never say. The result is an interaction that feels personal and elevated.

In B2B, the luxury dynamic is consistently underestimated. Enterprise buying decisions are shaped by trust and by the professional identity of the person making them. A buyer who brings a platform into their organisation is making a statement about their own standards. A brand that signals craft and a genuine point of view gives that person something to stand behind in a way that a feature comparison never will. Brand strategy in tech can no longer live only in marketing. It has to run through product behaviour, through how the platform communicates, and through every interaction from the first touchpoint to deep operational use.

The luxury brand parallel shapes how we think about every touchpoint in the customer relationship. Walking into a luxury boutique feels different from walking into any other shop. The environment is deliberate. The person behind the counter knows you. That is the standard we hold our customer experience to. Onboarding should feel like that first moment in the boutique: considered, unhurried and immediately reassuring. The first conversation, the proposal, the implementation, the ongoing relationship. Each one is a touchpoint in a 360 degree experience that should feel coherent and crafted from beginning to end.

We have invested more than 17,000 hours of engineering in this platform. That heritage is not a number to put in a pitch deck. It is the foundation of the confidence a customer should feel the first time they run a governed network change and it works exactly as it should. We draw on heritage from games design to build UX that feels meticulous and alive, where every interaction is considered and nothing is accidental.