Cubo – LLM Brand & Digital Product
Focus:
Brand Strategy, Digital Product
Role:
Brand Strategist
Timeline:
March 2026
Context
A New York-based brand strategy firm asked internship applicants to position a new LLM to compete with OpenAI and Claude. The brief required identifying a target audience, defining unmet needs, finding competitive whitespace, and arriving at a single-minded brand positioning. The brief asked whether the positioning could function as a filter for both product roadmap and talent decisions instead of simply marketing.
The Opening
What problem are you actually trying to solve?
The uncomfortable, 5 seconds of white space your eyes just scanned is not empty. That pause is where the best human thinking occurs. Every other AI compresses the cognitive timeline, even though the best solutions come out of friction.
The Insight
The Incubation Effect is a psychological phenomenon where stepping away from a complex problem allows the unconscious mind to keep working. This time away produces the "aha moment" that arrives at moments expected least. Leonardo da Vinci returned to the Mona Lisa for 14 years for this very same reason.
Current AI erases the incubation period. It performs well on "kind" problems but fails on "wicked ones", the problems that require slower thinking and lack the right question to begin with. Questions like:
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What business should we actually be in?
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What is the right research question to be asking?
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What is the best way to emotionally connect with our audience?
Consumer Truth
People are already experiencing the incubation effect, they just can't name it. A consistent pattern emerged in five qualitative interviews with daily AI users. People are starting to distrust themselves for using AI.
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Users feel it as a blow to their ego when AI makes a mistake – "I wasn't just using my own brain"
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When asked who is responsible for a bad AI-assisted decision, every respondent named the human prompter
This proves people already believe they are the most capable actor in the room. Even when AI helps, users feel it discounts their own thinking.
Competitive Whitespace
The defining tension in the AI market right now is trust. ChatGPT, a generalist toolkit for mainstream users, owns breadth with 80% of global chatbot traffic. Claude owns depth, a thinking partner for developers, writers, and analysts, who desire constructive criticism. Both optimize for output speed. Neither owns the space between the question and the answer – where the best thinking happens. That is the whitespace.
The Brand
Cubo.
From cubare, the Latin root of incubation. To rest with something.
Stay Human.
Cubo is an LLM built around the idea that AI can draw the best solutions out of the human mind and elevate creativity. Instead of minimizing the distance between question and answer, Cubo protects and prompts the human thinking process. It interrogates the question out of the human before offering anything new. It might give you three better questions to sit with, call out circular thinking, or maybe even tell you to take a creative break and come back tomorrow.
From Positioning to Product
"Stay Human" was designed as a filter for all product decisions. What does this mean? Every product, talent, and go-to market decision flows from the same question: does this protect the human's role in the room?
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Product roadmap – every feature slows the user down at the right moment. The interface is built around problem-framing. The first step to solving a problem is always identifying the right question.
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Talent and acquisition – every person building Cubo believes in intentional restraint from AI. Acquisitions target cognitive psychology and behavioral science instead of faster inference or broader training data.
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Go-to-market – targets professionals whose career is built on the quality of their judgment. Partnerships with MBA programs and consultancies tackling real wicked problems.
Reflection
This case reinforced something I think about constantly in my research on AI and human creativity. The most powerful intervention is knowing when to take a step back from AI. Framing "Stay Human" as both a brand truth and a product strategy showed me how positioning, when it's genuinely single-minded, can govern an entire product's decisions.