A litmus test for the utility of AI features

AI features are ubiquitous these days. From Word to Notepad, Photoshop to MS paint, Slack to WhatsApp (why?) every single app seems to be crammed full of AI features. Some features are genuinely useful. Most are not. Lately, I've been finding myself wondering, how do I tell them apart? Should I just ignore all of it like a Luddite? Or should I embrace it all, and spend my days wading through AI features? Is there no easy way to figure out how useful an AI feature is?

after months of searching, I'm happy to announce that I've got it: The one surefire, guaranteed, "SaaS companies hate this one-little trick" rule for any platform: "The utility of an AI feature is inversely proportional to the amount of screen real-estate a developer devotes to invoking it". Big pop-ups, multiple buttons, floating chat windows and annoying banners? Useless. A single button hidden away in the UI? Useful. It's as simple as that. Let me illustrate my point with Adobe acrobat, a tool I've been using for decades.

The default page you're greeted with when you open a PDF in Adobe acrobat.

Can you count how many AI buttons there are? In the top bar, there's one big "ask AI assistant button" and an additional little button that lets you listen to your document in podcast form. On the left sidebar, there's one AI assistant button and another generative summary button. On the right sidebar there is a generative summary button. The more eagle-eyed reader will also notice the big blue banner on top for a generative summary using the AI assistant. And of course, there is a subtle pop up on the bottom of the screen that lets me ask a question from the AI assistant. So that's 7 buttons for the same feature, just in the default page I see when I open a PDF*. And that's without counting this lovely web page that automatically opened when I opened Acrobat today.

Hey, we noticed you weren't using our free AI, but what if it cost 25 quid a month? tempting isn't it?

In contrast to Acrobat, Photoshop is, in my opinion, an example of generative AI integrated correctly into the UI. Consider the example below. The UI is the same clean interface I've seen for decades. There is one contextual generative fill option that comes up only when it becomes relevant. These tools are both built by the same company, but one is built to benefit the user, while the other is what I call an "antagonistic interface": an interface that is explicitly designed to achieve the objectives of the vendor, as opposed to the user. This is a trend that is seen across user interfaces of various services of late, and the integration of AI buttons is just one example.

Yes, I'm trying to photoshop the face of Venezuela's former president onto a slot machine. ?

Even in tools like text editors, where AI is deeply integrated and creates significant value (perhaps the value of AI in coding is a topic of contention, but no one can dispute that it is very widely adopted, at least) the interface by default is quite clean, with the option to open the AI sidebar tucked away in the title bar. How is it that the AI chat button in a tool with incredibly high AI adoption is a single discreet button, while Acrobat needs 7 massive buttons for it plastered in every conceivable location in my PDF reader?

The simple elegance of VS code

The reason why this litmus test works is simple. When AI adds real value to the user, there is little reason to cram it down her throat, she will naturally find it, and keep using it. In contrast, when it adds little to no value to the user, but the vendor wants to boast about AI adoption, then the interface becomes one giant "please use our AI features" catastrophe.

Another particularly egregious example is Microsoft's Office 365 app bait and switch. This one is worth an article of it's own, but in essence dear reader, when your trusty author, due to an unfortunate incident involving his laptop battery in the middle of a call, had to quickly access an excel sheet, and decided to open up the Microsoft Office 365 app on iOS, what do you suppose he was greeted by? Instead of the trusty integrated office file viewer that he was expecting, he was slapped with this:

What was "on my mind" when I saw this is not suitable for putting in writing.

That's right dear reader, Microsoft was so desperate for AI adoption, that instead of creating a copilot app, and hoping that users would find it useful, they bait-and-switched the existing Office 365 viewer with an AI chatbot. They ctrl+x'd their office viewer, that has 1 million+ ratings, and therefore many millions of users, and swapped it with a chatbot. The only way to view my office files on this new app, as far as I can make out, is to open the hamburger menu, then click search, and then find your office documents. Thanks to my trusty litmus test, I can guarantee that this app is useless without typing in a single question into that chat window.

I could go on and on with...