"Now with AI." "AI-powered." "AI-enhanced."
At some point in the last six months, these phrases stopped generating curiosity and started generating eye rolls. Not from people who reject AI tools outright, but from the people who use them every day.
This is not a backlash against the technology. It is a backlash against the marketing. And the distinction matters, because the two are getting conflated in ways that could hurt genuinely useful products.
The Saturation Problem
Every SaaS product now has an AI feature. Many of them are thin wrappers around the same handful of language model APIs. When a project management tool adds "AI-powered task summaries" and a CRM adds "AI-powered contact insights" and a calendar app adds "AI-powered scheduling," the label stops communicating anything specific. It becomes noise.
The pattern is familiar from previous tech cycles. "Cloud-based" went through the same arc around 2014. "Blockchain-enabled" cratered even faster. The label becomes a checkbox for marketing pages rather than a signal of genuine capability.
What makes the AI version of this more corrosive is that some of these features are actually good. GitHub Copilot genuinely changes how code gets written. AI-powered transcription from tools like Fireflies or Otter saves real hours. But when those sit next to "AI-enhanced email subject line suggestions," everything blurs together.
What Users Actually Want to Know
The fatigue is not about AI existing. It is about not being able to tell which AI features are substantive and which are marketing theater. People who work with these tools daily have started developing a filter: ignore the label, try the feature, judge it on output quality.
That is a rational response, but it means genuinely useful AI features now have to overcome skepticism before they even get tested. A tool that spent 18 months building a sophisticated retrieval system (where the AI searches through your own documents to find relevant information before generating answers) gets the same "oh, another AI feature" reaction as one that bolted on a ChatGPT prompt.
The companies that will hold attention are the ones that stop leading with "AI" and start leading with the specific problem they solve. "Transcribes your meetings with 95% accuracy in 30 languages" is a better pitch than "AI-powered meeting assistant." The technology should be invisible. The result should be obvious.
For those of us who review and recommend AI tools, the fatigue is a useful signal. It means the market is maturing past the phase where slapping "AI" on a feature was enough to generate interest. That is healthy. The tools that survive the label fatigue will be the ones that deliver results you would pay for even if nobody mentioned AI.