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AI has failed to replace a single software application or feature

cadabrabra Friday, January 30, 2026

I can’t name a single software application or software feature that has been mooted by AI. Zero. Take Excel as an example. Not only has AI failed to replace Excel in its entirety, but it has also failed to replace any of its features. AI was simply appended as an additional feature in the form of an agentic chatbot. This has been the trend across the entire industry, and it’s why AI has failed to fundamentally transform any of our exiting software application.

Now you might ask: what about AI native applications? Well, as it turns out, most of them are essentially clones of existing software but with a chatbot slapped on top. Because of the error prone nature of AI, any application that leverages it also has to surface all of the controls required to override all of its decisions. So you end up with a traditional software application plus AI.

AI promised to transform and even replace software applications, but all it did instead was augment them with an unreliable chatbot. All of the old fields and buttons are still there, but now there’s an additional text field that you can type into and hope for the best.

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