Let’s be honest: You’re tired of hearing about AI
Every week, a new model drops. Another demo goes viral. Another headline promises your job will disappear (or triple your productivity, depending on the CEO’s mood). Slack channels are half-human, half-bot. Your LinkedIn feed is a nonstop parade of “10 ChatGPT prompts that changed my life.”
The hype is deafening. And somewhere in the last six months, a switch flipped. The excitement curdled into exhaustion.
Sound familiar? Good. That means we’re exactly where we need to be.
The Trough of Disillusionment
Tech adoption follows a predictable curve. First comes the innovation trigger — a breakthrough that feels like magic (ChatGPT late 2022). Then the peak of inflated expectations — everyone thinks the world changes overnight (all of 2023). Then comes the crash: the trough of disillusionment.
We’re in the trough now.
The headlines have shifted from “AI will save us” to “AI is overhyped garbage.” People are tired of hallucinations, closed APIs, and the creeping sense that we’re all just beta-testing for billion-dollar companies. The early adopter rush is over.
Here’s the thing: the trough is not the end. It’s the beginning of the real work.
What Happens in the Trough
This is where the hype dissipates and the actual utility becomes apparent. Think back to previous cycles:
· The internet (late 1990s): Dot-com crash. Pets.com dies. Pundits declare the web a fad. Then broadband rolls out, and Amazon becomes unstoppable.
· Cloud computing (2008): “Nobody will put sensitive data on someone else’s servers.” Then AWS matured, and every startup was born in the cloud.
· Crypto (2018–2020): “Dead” according to 300+ obituaries. Meanwhile, infrastructure quietly got built. DeFi and stablecoins emerged.
The pattern is the same every time. Hype arrives. Hype collapses. The survivors build boring, useful things. A few years later, everyone wonders managed to livehey lived without it.
AI is no different.
The Boring, Useful AI is Coming
The current AI conversation is dominated by chat interfaces — flashy, conversational, and often unreliable. But the next wave looks nothing like that.
· Embedded AI: Not a chatbot you talk to. A spreadsheet that auto‑completes the right category. An email client that drafts replies in your voice without being asked. An IDE that catches bugs before you compile.
· Small, specialized models: Not GPT‑5 with a trillion parameters. A tiny model that runs on your laptop and does exactly one thing — summarization, transcription, data extraction — with near‑perfect accuracy.
· Workflow automation that actually works: Not “AI replaces your team.” AI handles the 20% repetitive drag on every task — pulling data from PDFs, reformatting reports, routing requests — so humans do the interesting 80%.
None of this makes headlines. None of this gets a viral demo. But this is the stuff that changes how people work, one boring integration at a time.
What to Do While Everyone Argues
You don’t need to master every new model. You don’t need to be an AI influencer. You just need to do three things.
1. Ignore the hype. Pay attention to your friction points.
Where do you currently waste 15 minutes on something repetitive? Formatting, searching, summarizing, comparing? That’s where AI helps. Not in galactic world‑changing visions. In the tiny daily annoyances, you’ve stopped noticing.
2. Use AI like a bicycle, not a chauffeur.
The best AI users don’t ask “do this for me.” They ask “Help me do this faster.” They write the first draft, then ask AI to tighten it. They sketch the spreadsheet, then ask AI to fill in the obvious cells. Co‑pilot, not autopilot.
3. Build small, private, cheap.
The big public models are amazing for exploration. For real work, look for open‑source models you can run locally (Llama, Mistral). Use APIs with local caching. Keep your data out of training pools. The boring infrastructure is already here — and it’s shockingly affordable.
The Long ViLoq
AI right now is like the smartphone in 2009. The iPhone had been launched two years earlier. Everyone was obsessed with fart apps and shaky video. The App Store was chaos. And if you’d predicted that your phone would replace your wallet, your GPS, your camera, and half your doctor’s visits, people would have laughed.
We’re still in the fart‑app era of AI. The truly transformative stuff — ambient, invisible, reliable — is coming. It just won’t arrive with a press release.
So take a breath. Unfollow the AI influencers. Close the “State of AI” report. Go build something small, boring, and useful.
We’re Exhausted by AI. That’s Exactly on Schedule.We’re Exhausted by AI. That’s Exactly on Schedule.
That’s not giving up on AI. That’s the smartest way to bet on it.