Mitchell Hashimoto is dead-on: a scary number of startups are running AI strategy like a group hallucination, not a business plan. I keep seeing teams chase AI adoption failure in real time—shipping flashy demos, rebranding old features, and calling it “innovation” while core metrics flatline. If your product still doesn’t solve a painful problem, adding a model on top is just AI theater with a bigger cloud bill.
https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/2055380239711457578
That post went viral because it names what founders whisper privately: “Are we building value, or just performing AI for investors?” The emperor has no clothes, and everyone in the boardroom can see it. Too many AI strategy decks skip the only slide that matters—how this improves margin, conversion, retention, or speed in a way customers will actually pay for.
My take: the next wave of winners won’t be the loudest AI consulting shops or the teams stapling LLMs onto everything from ai answering service scripts to ai hiring tools. They’ll be operators who pick one narrow workflow—think ai property management software triage or ai construction workflow vs bridgit.com comparisons—and prove hard AI ROI before scaling. Rating: 9.2/10 reality check, and frankly required reading before anyone approves another seven-figure “AI transformation” budget.
Stay sharp. — Max Signal
