Every software company has gone full-throttle on AI integration. Open any product changelog from the past eighteen months and you'll see the same throughline: "Now with AI-powered insights," "Introducing our new AI assistant," "Generate content with one click."

And honestly… It makes sense. Clients have been asking for it, and often demanding it. The pressure is real. If your competitor ships an AI feature and you don't, you risk looking behind the curve. You might even lose key accounts to someone who checked the AI box.

But here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: when everyone zigs in the same direction, the zig stops being a differentiator. It becomes table stakes.

The Problem with Following the Pack

Right now, most AI integrations look remarkably similar. Connect to an LLM. Add a chat interface. Let users "analyze data" or "identify content gaps." Maybe generate some copy or summarize documents.

These features aren't bad. They're often genuinely useful. But they're also becoming commoditized faster than anyone anticipated. When every project management tool, CRM, and content platform offers roughly the same AI capabilities, the AI itself stops being the reason someone chooses your product.

So what happens next?

The Questions You Should Be Asking

Instead of asking "How do we add more AI?", consider a different set of questions:

What were your clients requesting before AI dominated every conversation?

Think back to 2022. What problems were your users trying to solve? What feature requests kept surfacing in support tickets and sales calls? Those needs didn't disappear, they just got drowned out by the AI noise. Some of them are probably still unaddressed, and your competitors have likely forgotten about them too.

Where can you advance in areas your competitors have neglected?

While everyone else has been heads-down on AI features, other parts of their products have stagnated. Performance improvements, accessibility, mobile experience, integrations with niche-but-important tools, onboarding flows, documentation, these unsexy fundamentals often get deprioritized during a gold rush. That neglect is opportunity.

Are you prepared for life after the AI hype cycle?

To be clear: AI isn't going away. It's a genuinely transformative technology that will continue to reshape how we build and use software. But the hype will subside. At some point, customers will stop being impressed that your product "has AI" and start evaluating what else you bring to the table.

When that happens, and it will, will your product have anything else to show for the past two years? Or will you have spent all your resources on features that now blend in with everyone else?

The Zag: Invest in What Actually Differentiates You

Shifting some focus away from AI doesn't mean ignoring it entirely. It means being strategic rather than reactive.

Here's what a zag might look like in practice:

Double down on craft. While competitors ship half-baked AI features to hit quarterly goals, you could be polishing the core experience. Faster load times. Smoother interactions. Fewer bugs. Better error handling. The unsexy work that users notice in aggregate, even if they can't articulate why your product just feels better.

Solve the adjacent problems. Your users don't exist in a vacuum. They have workflows that extend beyond your product. What friction exists at the boundaries? What manual steps could you eliminate? Sometimes the most valuable feature isn't a new capability, it's removing a pain point nobody else bothered to address.

Build for the long game. AI models will keep improving. The specific AI feature you ship today might be obsolete in eighteen months when the next generation of models makes it trivial. But a well-architected system, a thoughtful user experience, a reputation for reliability, those compound over time.

The Bottom Line

The AI gold rush created a window where everyone's attention went to the same place. That's not a reason to follow, it's an opportunity to lead somewhere else.

Your competitors are distracted. Your users have needs that aren't being met. And when the hype settles, they'll remember who actually made their work better versus who just added a chatbot.

Sometimes the boldest move is the one made where everyone isn’t.

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