Doing More, Shipping Less

Everyone is doing more with AI. More spend, more tokens, more usage, and that’s become the thing people point at to show they’re getting value. Look how much we’ve ramped. Look at the adoption curve. And yet the same people quietly complain the impact isn’t landing the way they expected. The usage went up. The shipping didn’t.I’ve been chewing on this for a few weeks. I think two things are going on. Most people are wrong about what good use of AI actually is. And there’s a structural reason they drift away from it even when they know better.Most things failStart from what the job actually is: ship things customers want and will pay for. Then sit with an uncomfortable fact. Most of what we build fails. At a large company, you might be slightly better than average, but it’s really hard to tell the good bet from the bad one in advance.I learned this the hard way at Mixpanel. I worked on a feature that let customers bring all kinds of data into Mixpanel and analyze it there. We spent…