Paint Color Namer

Paint companies have thousands of colors to name. Benjamin Moore says its library has more than 3,500, and every new name is checked against that list and for legal problems, which can take several months. But naming is rarely a job on its own. A Benjamin Moore color expert told Apartment Therapy in 2020 that "no one person is the official 'namer'": it is a group effort, sometimes open to any employee who wants to join in. The real jobs sit in color marketing, such as Sherwin-Williams' director of color marketing, who also looks for trends and inspiration.

Writing short, catchy names is the kind of work today's AI tools are good at. In 2017 a researcher trained an early neural network on about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams colors and got famously bad names such as "Stoomy Brown," Ars Technica reported. Current language models are far better writers: a 2025 Microsoft Research study of AI chatbot use ranked writers 3rd and marketing specialists 26th of 785 occupations for how much of their work AI can help with. (Microsoft sells AI tools, and the authors warn that a high score does not mean job losses.) We found no reliable report of a major paint company replacing its naming team with AI.

The wider color-marketing job, forecasting trends, choosing which colors to launch and speaking for the brand, is harder to hand to AI. The government does not count paint namers. Marketing managers, the category this work falls under, are projected to grow 6.9% from 2025 to 2035, faster than the 3.5% average.

We keep this at 3. Brainstorming names is where AI is strongest, so the naming part of the job will likely need fewer people, while the trend and brand work holds up. What would change the score: major paint brands using AI-written names for their collections, or cutting color-marketing staff, would push it to 4, level with color forecasting.