AI Is in a Weird Place Right Now
Three years into AI mania, things continue to be volatile. The items capturing buzz continue to evolve while consumers are looking at AI with increasingly divergent viewpoints.
Consider the following AI developments that have been on my radar:
Chatbot platform craze has cooled. Efforts to turn chatbots into new-age digital platforms are not going as smoothly as some companies planned. The idea of using apps within ChatGPT, not surprisingly, has flatlined. The same goes for agentic commerce. Walmart provided the latest evidence that chatbot usage isn’t trending like some proponents hoped – purchase conversion inside ChatGPT was one-third the rate of purchase conversion on Walmart’s website.
Mania has turned to utility agents. OpenClaw and Claude Code are grabbing the buzz that previously went to consumer-oriented chatbots. In the process, AI utility has become more niche and difficult to access for the mass market. ChatGPT usage
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