---
id: "quote-costume-change"
type: "quote"
source_timestamps: ["§ Agentic AI's Diversity Challenge"]
tags: ["prompt-engineering", "ai-personas"]
related: ["concept-cosmetic-ai-diversity", "contrarian-costume-change", "entity-enver-cetin"]
speaker: "Enver Cetin"
speakers: ["Enver Cetin"]
quote: "When the stack underneath is uniform, dressing the agents in different personas is mostly cosmetic. Costume change is not cognition."
sources: ["agentic"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-agentic"
originDay: 6
articleStem: "hbr-new-28-agent-teams-different-models"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2026/06/the-strongest-teams-of-ai-agents-will-be-built-using-different-models"
sourceTitle: "The Strongest Teams of AI Agents Will Be Built Using Different Models"
---
# Costume change is not cognition

> "When clients talk to me about diversity in agentic AI, they usually mean personality or cultural diversity at the agent layer. The real problem I see across financial services, automotive, and retail is that nearly everyone is running on the same handful of foundation models, the same retrieval architectures, often the same data sources. When the stack underneath is uniform, dressing the agents in different personas is mostly cosmetic. **Costume change is not cognition.**"

— [[entity-enver-cetin]], Director at [[entity-ciklum]]

The article's signature line. It crystallizes [[concept-cosmetic-ai-diversity]] and the contrarian thesis in [[contrarian-costume-change]]: because the model, retrieval architecture, and data sources underneath are identical, swapping personas changes the costume, not the cognition.