This is the best summary of the AI product problem I've read all year.
Clients have money and are happy to pay tens of thousands of dollars, for a vendor to come in and make a top-3 problem go away. Vendor instead pitches transforming the business with their agentic AI product and pushes through with a monthly recurring subscription to their wares. In the hundreds of dollars.
This is not a one-off. I'm seeing it all the time.
In fact, I had a similar conversation yesterday with an AI video production vendor.
I want: high-quality product videos.
They want: to sell credits.
Working out how many of those become one finished 60 second video is left to the buyer. The motion design learning curve is mine too.
Apple never sold an 80GB iPod, right? They sold a thousand songs in your pocket.
For anyone selling agentic AI for anything: speak a familiar language. Do the work end-to-end, use AI agents to fatten your margin quietly on your side of the wall. That's the whole business if you're smart. Charge me $1,000, spend a couple of hundred on inference, keep the difference and never say the word token to me again.
I made a version of this argument about taking customers on a journey. Same failure in different clothes.
No one wants the journey. No one wants to be transformed. No one wants to learn a new skill in order to receive something they were perfectly happy to buy finished.
Whether through product design or service design, route the customer around this friction.
Clients have money and are happy to pay tens of thousands of dollars, for a vendor to come in and make a top-3 problem go away. Vendor instead pitches transforming the business with their agentic AI product and pushes through with a monthly recurring subscription to their wares. In the hundreds of dollars.
This is not a one-off. I'm seeing it all the time.
In fact, I had a similar conversation yesterday with an AI video production vendor.
I want: high-quality product videos.
They want: to sell credits.
Working out how many of those become one finished 60 second video is left to the buyer. The motion design learning curve is mine too.
Apple never sold an 80GB iPod, right? They sold a thousand songs in your pocket.
For anyone selling agentic AI for anything: speak a familiar language. Do the work end-to-end, use AI agents to fatten your margin quietly on your side of the wall. That's the whole business if you're smart. Charge me $1,000, spend a couple of hundred on inference, keep the difference and never say the word token to me again.
I made a version of this argument about taking customers on a journey. Same failure in different clothes.
No one wants the journey. No one wants to be transformed. No one wants to learn a new skill in order to receive something they were perfectly happy to buy finished.
Whether through product design or service design, route the customer around this friction.
