EdgeDimi

when consumers don't care that you're building an AI product (and might even hate it) I'm hearing a common thread from consumer AI founders: Consumers often don't really care that your new startup product uses AI under the covers, and in fact, when they find out, they find it to be a negative. WTF? I thought everyone was supposed to love AI. It's simple: we've trained consumers for decades to believe that the fanciest, best customer interaction is a one-on-one human concierge doing whatever you want. Automation is seen as cutting corners. The most luxurious hotel/travel experiences involve overstaffed resorts where humans cater to your every whim. The highest level of customer service from a product company? The founder working directly with you to solve your problem. So, when consumers hear you're using product underneath, they're often repelled, associating it with low-cost, cheap service. It's tough when you're in the business of using AI to disrupt a human-intensive industry. Think AI travel planning, dating concierge, or real estate brokers. The vision is clear: use AI to create more interactivity, answer questions quickly, and give great service. But many founders are finding that customers most value interacting with another human. How do you get around this? How do you solve the problem of building powerful AI that consumers seem to dislike? In the end, whether your product uses AI or not, consumers just care about the results. That might mean your product is there for them 24/7, able to answer questions instead of interacting with a call center rep where it takes minutes to connect. Or maybe the detail that you're creating in your product might take a human hours, but your service can create it instantly. So maybe it's the speed, comprehensiveness, and instantaneous nature of it. Or maybe it's that the cost is incredibly low because you don't have to pay humans to do all this work. Either way, these things become the value props, not "AI." If your product uses AI, it's more of an enabling technology, something that sits underneath that ties all the capabilities together. But just as we stopped caring about megahertz, bandwidth speeds, etc, we'll stop caring about what underlying model is used. It's the question of whether the UX is better or not. This conclusion feels obvious in some ways, but it also flies in the face of the current startup/investor mindset. Why is that? The reason is that in the B2B market, startups are finding enterprise customers very excited and motivated to evaluate and buy AI products. That's because it's such a tech big technology trend that there is a top down drive towards utilizing AI to potentially decrease costs. As a result, everything in B2B is pulling new AI startups into their markets, and creating a ton of value along the way. However, consumers just interact with products differently. Caring less about the underlying functionality and technology trends and much more about things like brand, visual appeal, UX, and the evaluation process sometimes happens intuitively and quickly. It's worth acknowledging that investors are pushing every new startup to bet big on AI. There are a lot of reasons for this, and some of it is circular. The good reason is that AI is a new general-purpose technology that might reinvent every product category and answer the "why now" question, so even apps that have been tried over the last 20 years can be retried with a different approach. Plus, if you don't at least pretend to have an AI strategy, some VCs simply aren't interested in even looking at the company. As a result, you have a whole generation of startups that want to yell loudly in their pitch decks about how AI-native they are, even while their consumer customers seem confused or dislike AI. The consumer value prop for your startup can be totally different than how you talk about it with investors, employees, and partners. For consumers, the shortest path to conveying immediate value is the way to go. Describe your product with a pithy tagline so they know how they'll get value within 30 seconds. However, investors and employees want to know how what you're doing will eventually revolutionize the world. Google might be a search engine, but its mission is to organize the world's information. An AI travel planning app might be positioned as "The quickest way to build a vacation itinerary for your family," but for investors, it's described as an "AI-native travel marketplace."