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  • I have yet to see AI being successfully onboarded in brands where I feel it actually benefits me.

    QuickBooks has annoying suggestions that shift the whole UI and cannot be disabled. Misclicks now happen.

    The AI in my robot vacuum is... just a label? I don't want to talk to it. I want it to deterministically clean my stuff.

    My TV got an upgrade to Gemini. Why? I don't talk to the TV, and it's in my face. (I'm think about getting a device that can do Plex->Atmos streaming).

  • "Why is that? How could that be? The answer is because customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or services."

    - Steve Jobs

    from https://youtu.be/XbkMcvnNq3g?si=8Y56TFmKHJhlFXoE&t=364

  • Oh no. It can't really be because "AI" frequently means "we fire employees to make more money. And by the way, we don't actually care about quality". Right?
  • AI feels like “quick and cheap at the cost of quality” so I completely get why consumers would dislike it while business people love it.
  • For most consumers AI will be a net negative. Already I can tell more and more companies use it in their call centers and support workflows, often just to stonewall customers: they reply very politely and with great attention to detail but will not solve your issue as they don’t have any decision power.

    I really don’t look forward to this new world, AI is a powerful and useful too for creators but it will and already is used for all the wrong reasons, apparently even to pick which targets to destroy in war, essentially making life or death decisions in some areas with little to no oversight. And then people here think that any kind of regulation around this tech is useless and unwarranted…

    Don’t get me wrong I use AI all the time but I fear it will be the most disruptive technological development in both positive and negative ways that we have ever dealt with.

  • This is the problem with all of the recent “AI” crap that has been shoved into our devices.

    We have had ML features for years and it provided real benefits but most people did not know or care how it worked, it just did its job in the background without the underlying tech being shoved in your face.

    Everything AI though is the opposite, it wants to focus on the technology first and the benefits second. It is actively making a worse UI and often providing little to no benefit.

    Most consumers don’t actually care how their tech works, just that it does and gives them benefits.

  • I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.
  • >No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today

    This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more.

    Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we went with some of the best and did our own intensive testing and worked on latencies etc., I actually thought the final version was pretty good but our customers just hated it.

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Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff · Birbla