Hello!
Today I'm thinking about a line from Elon Musk that people are buying Full Self-Driving with a car attached, not the other way around. People buying the outcome (it drives me places) instead of the tool (a car) is going to impact a lot more products, especially software. At a high level, this is how AI upends existing companies. Why does this matter so much for software? Because software teams spent decades making tools people use to get the outcomes they want. Photoshop is a good example. It has thirty-plus years of interface built around manipulating pixels, but when you want to edit a photo you're thinking "make her hair flow to the left," not "select these pixels and apply a transform." The tool sits between you and what you actually want. I've been chasing this idea for a while. Back in 2024, I wrote about how the continuous march of "more features, more UI" leaves people with more functions they don't know about and don't use, and how AI lets you control software with hundreds of features by just telling it what you want to do. Last month I pushed it further: start from the outcome ("here's the news you asked for") and let people engage with the tools later if they want to. Outcome first, tool second. The car example just makes it really concrete. Nobody wants a steering wheel, they want to get somewhere. As we've said for years, we don't call carpenters "hammer users." So if you're building software today, ask yourself: what's the "it drives me places" version of your product? Because if you don't ship that, someone else will, with your tool attached as an afterthought.
Show me a video of your "AI Ate My Website" talk.
Here's a video of my How AI Ate My Website talk. In it I walk through what happened when AI (quite literally) ate my website, and how advances in AI models now enable different ways of interacting with Web sites beyond just searching or browsing them.
Since the inception of the Web over 30 years ago, not only has the number of Web sites published continued to grow but so has the amount of articles, videos, images, PDFs, and more that we publish online.
If you want the opening bit, that's where I ask what people picture when they hear "AI eating a website." Most folks imagine a giant computer brain eating up web pages on its way to global dominance. The reality is a lot less scary (and my little AI guys always come back).
I've also given this talk live at conferences, including ConveyUX in Seattle. And if you want to dig deeper, there's a short clip where I explain how we break down videos, podcasts, PDFs, and images using AI models so they can be reassembled into a Q&A interface. You'll find all the videos of this talk in the Presentations section of my Web site.