Any time a company suddenly changes the name of products — or even its core brand — to include the latest technology, the market grows wary.
The latest version is called “AI washing”, which describes dressing up old products in artificial intelligence branding to mislead investors and customers. It seems to work: this month, Allbirds, once a $4bn (R67bn) leader in sustainable footwear, sold its brand and assets for just $39m and rebranded as NewBird AI. Suddenly it was in the business of buying high-performance GPU computer chips for leasing to AI developers.
Shares leapt by more than 580% in a single day, from under $3 to around $17. The stock subsequently gave up half that value, but the surge proved that investors are often ready to act like Pavlov’s dog, salivating at the sound of an AI bell.
Clearly, however, not all rebrands are equal.
Trend Micro, the Japanese company long associated with enterprise cybersecurity, last month relaunched its enterprise business as TrendAI, placing AI at the centre of how it defines its role. Rather than AI washing, it appears to be an example of a company rebranding to reflect where it has already moved.
Enterprises are redesigning how work gets done around AI, data and agentic systems. Our role is to ensure they can do so with confidence, control and resilience built in from the start.
— Eva Chen, CEO of Trend Micro.
“TrendAI reflects our conviction that security must evolve as quickly as the technology it protects,” said Eva Chen, CEO of Trend Micro. “Enterprises are redesigning how work gets done around AI, data and agentic systems. Our role is to ensure they can do so with confidence, control and resilience built in from the start.”
That description moves security away from its traditional position at the edges of systems and places it at the point where systems are designed and where data is produced.
The company describes its approach as extending across the full lifecycle of AI, including how systems are built, how they connect and how they act within organisations. The emphasis falls on governance as much as protection.
Rachel Jin, who leads the TrendAI business, said it was a fundamentally new way of approaching cybersecurity.
“As AI systems take on more responsibility, security must evolve from reacting to events to understanding intent and governing machine-driven actions,” she said. ‘Organisations need visibility, context and control over how AI behaves across their environments, not just how it is protected.”
The change reflects how enterprise systems are evolving. AI systems now operate across multiple environments, interact with data in real time, and increasingly take on roles that involve judgement and execution rather than simple processing. In this context, system management shifts from how to defend systems to how to govern them.
TrendAI’s answer is to build that governance into the environment itself.
Chen described this as an integrated approach that brings together visibility across systems, enforcement of policy, and oversight of how AI operates in practice. The model assumes that security becomes part of the operating fabric of the enterprise, rather than a layer applied after deployment.
Our continued investment includes the delivery of a truly locally governed data centre, with its own data lake in South Africa — the first of its kind on the continent
— Gareth Redelinghuys, country MD of TrendAI sub-Saharan Africa
Since AI systems rely on access to data — often across multiple environments — regulatory frameworks increasingly define where that data can reside and how it can be used. Infrastructure decisions therefore shape the scope within which AI can operate, placing security vendors in a different position within the enterprise.
In South Africa, the strategy takes a more concrete form. It focuses on data location and regulatory alignment, bringing the global model into a local context.
Gareth Redelinghuys, country MD of TrendAI sub-Saharan Africa, linked the relaunch directly to that context during the South African launch of TrendAI in Cape Town last week.
“The enhancement of our investments represents more than infrastructure expansion; it reinforces our commitment to sovereign, secure and scalable digital ecosystems for Africa,” he said. “Through our rebranding and continued investment, we’re strengthening our position as a trusted partner to government and enterprise clients who require auditable, compliant and future-ready environments.”
The launch event proved to be less significant for the rebranding, however, than for what it signalled about the company’s investment in the region.
“Our continued investment includes the delivery of a truly locally governed data centre, with its own data lake in South Africa — the first of its kind on the continent,” said Redelinghuys.
“TrendAI is increasing its long-term commitment to the continent, with plans to expand its footprint through additional local data centre deployments in key African markets. This investment represents the first phase of a wider African infrastructure rollout.”
• Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI: The African Edge
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