AI is the fastest way to make your product worse (if you’re not careful)

This might sound harsh, but I keep seeing products get worse the moment AI is added.

It’s not that AI is bad. It’s just… people throw it everywhere without really thinking. We worked on a product recently where “smart features” were on every screen. On a demo it looked impressive, but when you actually used it… it broke the flow, slowed everything down, and users didn’t trust it.

At some point, we had to sit down and ask ourselves: what actually adds value here?

We ended up cutting about 70% of the AI features and kept just one key moment where it truly helped. And guess what? The product suddenly felt simpler, clearer, and more usable.

Sometimes I feel like we’re in a “Flash animation era 2.0” — flashy tech for tech’s sake, but painful for real users.

So I’m curious — has AI ever genuinely improved your product, or just made things noisier?