There's a famous quote that people in tech like to use. It was supposedly said by Henry Ford about the invention of the automobile:

If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses’.

There is no actual evidence that Ford ever said this - regardless, it has become a favorite adage for people talking about creativity and innovation. It’s often accompanied by a smirk and an air of superiority. The essential message being that users don’t actually know what they want or what true innovation looks like until a visionary comes along who presents it to them.

That mindset of “innovation against popular demand” seems quite pervasive in the IT industry these days, now that every tech company on the planet has decided that AI is the way to go.

Even though there’s an overwhelming chorus of consumer voices saying “we don’t actually want this”, most tech giants are so convinced that AI is the future that they’re still pushing it on every service and product under the sun.

Here’s the thing: that approach to innovation is a huge gamble. It really only works if the new, innovative thing is so undeniably better that once they see it, people will want to use it straight away.

The success of the iPhone, for example, was evident from the moment Steve Jobs first showed a breathless audience how to pinch-and-zoom a photo. Nobody had to force people to use it.

In contrast, most major tech companies have now started to opt-in users to their AI features against their will, sometimes making it almost impossible to disable them again.

Feature adoption doesn’t work if it’s forced; it has to come from a genuine user belief that the new feature can help them achieve their goals. And it certainly doesn’t work if the feature actually creates a worse user experience and degrades the quality of the product.

Google implementing AI search results has led to countless examples of misinformation, factual errors and hallucination. Google was already excellent at ranking information, guessing the intent behind a search phrase and modifying its results accordingly. They have now augmented that with a solution that gives either false (even dangerous) information or may just dream up answers on the spot.

The people might have asked for faster horses, but instead they got donkeys on LSD.

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I get that it’s not as fun to build “a faster horse”. To just make the thing you already have better, more reliable, more helpful. It doesn’t get your shareholders excited, and it doesn’t make you look like a visionary genius.

But in my opinion, the tech industry desperately needs less disruptive new shit for the sake of innovation and more listening to the actual problems users are facing out there.

To close, here’s a quote by Henry Ford that he did in fact say:

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.