Frictionless Experience
Lost in Translation: Now With More AI
Setting: Conference room. Morning. Coffee cups. One says “Disruptor.” The executive has just returned from a tech conference. The architect has just returned from debugging a production issue involving a single missing comma.
🎬 Scene 1: The Grand Vision
Executive: "Hey! Quick sync. Big idea. We’re going AI-first."
Architect: "Okay. What does that mean?"
Executive: "It means we start with AI. You know—intelligent by default."
Architect: "Like personalization? Recommendations? Chatbot support?"
Executive: "Yes, yes, and yes. But simple. Frictionless. Invisible AI."
Architect: "So... AI that does everything but nobody notices?"
Executive: "Exactly! Like Netflix meets ChatGPT, but for our business."
🎬 Scene 2: Vibes-Based Strategy
Architect: "Do you have a specific user flow in mind?"
Executive: "Not exactly. It just needs to feel inevitable."
Architect: "Inevitable like predictive UX? Or like AI apocalypse?"
Executive: "Like... it just works. The user doesn’t click, they glide."
🎬 Scene 3: Target Audience (Maybe?)
Architect: "Who’s the experience for?"
Executive: "Our customers."
Architect: "Which ones?"
Executive: "The loyal ones. And the ones we lost. And maybe future customers we haven’t met yet."
🎬 Scene 4: Budget & Magic
Architect: "Okay. Do we have a budget?"
Executive: "We want to be lean. This should mostly be calling an API, right? I heard OpenAI has something for this."
Architect: "They do. None of them do what you’re describing."
Executive: "Well, the AI will figure it out. That’s the point."
Post-Meeting Recap
- Executive leaves inspired: “We're officially AI-powered.”
- Architect opens a Confluence doc titled: “Vision Draft – AI-First, Budget-Neutral, Slightly Creepy Platform for Undifferentiated Users.”
- Kickoff scheduled. No agenda. Pastries promised.
The Moral
Everyone’s aligned—except on what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, how it works, who it’s for, and how much it costs.
In other words: business as usual.
Pro tip: If your AI plan can’t survive a basic question like “what does it do and a hypothosis on how it will provide value to someone?”—you don’t have a strategy. You have a conference buzzword with calendar invites attached.
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