Your Customers Hate AI

And the loudest people in VC-Land have no idea. A field report from planet Earth.

There’s a place I like to call VC-Land. You will not find it on a map. Technically, it’s a state of mind, but I like to picture it as an actual physical place anyway. In VC-Land, there are no buildings, only spaces made entirely of glass so everyone can see who else got the meeting. Fountains don’t flow with water in VC-Land. No, they bubble up with a cloudy orange natural wine that costs more than a prize racehorse and tastes exactly like its stable. The locals there have a very specific dialect. Every sentence spoken begins with “how are you thinking about—.” They use “long on” and “short on” to apply to feelings, weekends, and even other people’s children.

In VC-Land, everybody loves AI. It’s not so much an opinion as it is the weather. You can’t not love AI up there any more than you can dislike oxygen — it’s piped straight into the aforementioned glass spaces where all the residents breathe deep. I do not live in VC-Land. Neither, as it turns out, do most of my customers.

I walked into a recent BoD meeting for one of my companies with confidence that we were tracking. Great quarter, happy customers, long runway, numbers climbing up and to the right. The good news was well received, but it was tempered by a bit of displeasure. And the displeasure came down to AI. Specifically, the absence of AI as the headline or at least as a central part of every slide.

So we’re all clear: we’ve got plenty of AI baked into the product, which was not in question. What the room wanted was for me to lead with it, trumpet it, dip the entire company in AI and roll it in glittery AI tropes and memes.

Therein lies the liability of residing in VC-Land. If you’re an enterprise software jerkball operator like me, you know that the people who actually buy our wares do not want AI shoved in their faces. Many of them are not even sure they like AI in the first place. Some of them will show up with a pitchfork if you use the word at all.

Am I the only one whose YouTube feed is chock-full of graduation speakers getting booed for mentioning AI? Because that is the reality in which we find ourselves. And it doesn’t stop with kids in caps and gowns. Enterprise workers are freaked out and resentful. It doesn’t help that investors are going on podcasts talking about the death of the enterprise worker and then asking me to sell to the very folks whose doom they’re portending. And the people who actually buy what I sell — privacy officers, century-old insurers, loan servicers, marketers — have gone well past skepticism. They mostly think AI is awful for the planet. They resent the data centers humming away in their backyards. They don’t trust what it does with their data. They certainly don’t trust the people building it. AI has collapsed the time it takes to build a product. It also has collapsed the trust of the people I sell to.

When I lead with AI, I hand my customer permission to project the end of the world and the end of their own job onto what is, once you strip away the theater, just a better, smarter, faster piece of software. I say “AI,” and she doesn’t hear “this saves you six hours a week.” She hears “this is the thing the podcast bros promised would replace me.” That’s an own goal of the stupidest kind.

So, if you’re building and selling enterprise software, ignore the VCs and stop scoring on yourself. Do what good product marketing has done since the dawn of product marketing: tell the buyer how this makes their org better. How it makes their day easier. How it makes them more productive. Sell the outcome. Nobody buys the engine.

Now, none of this means what VC-Land will accuse it of meaning. Believing in the future of AI and depending on AI to sell your product are two entirely different things. I’m building AI into everything I touch. I just don’t believe that if I utter ‘AI’ on a sales call, it’ll get me a second meeting or make customers like me.

The product sells. The outcome sells. The word? Not so much. In fact, it can actively hurt you.

Maybe a day comes when slapping “AI” on the box is all asset and not a liability. That day arrives when my customers are ready for it, and they’ll be the ones to tell me. It is not today, and no amount of VC enthusiasm moves the date up.

Which brings me back to my friends in VC-Land — and I do mean friends. You are not the enemy here. We want exactly the same thing: all of our companies, not just surviving, but thriving. Your conviction is half the reason it exists at all. But from up there in the control tower, immersed in glass and barn wine, you can’t always see what I see down here on the ground.

So consider this a gentle note from the field. It’s a strange thing to spend Tuesday’s podcast forecasting the end of the enterprise worker, then ask me on Wednesday to go sell to that same worker using the one word you’ve just guaranteed will frighten her. I don’t think we do it on purpose. But it’s worth noticing.

Here’s my ask for easing off the AI drum. Trust the people closest to the customer. Let us build the thing the way it needs to be built and we will hand you the future you’re so excited about. We’ll just get there by not scaring shitless the very people we need to bring along for the ride.