I’ve watched three founders this month waste $60k on AI features their customers actively hate.

Not “don’t use.” Not “ignore.” Hate.

Here’s what happened: They built perfectly functional products. People paid for them. Then some investor asked “what’s your AI strategy?” and suddenly every product roadmap got derailed by chatbots nobody wanted.

The Pattern Is Everywhere

Last week, a founder showed me their project management tool. It worked great. Users loved it. Then they added an “AI assistant” that suggests task priorities.

Know what it does? Gets in the way. Every. Single. Time.

The AI pops up suggestions based on keywords it doesn’t understand. It confidently recommends priorities that make no sense. Users now spend time dismissing suggestions instead of, you know, managing their projects.

Why’d they build it? Because their Series A pitch deck needed an AI slide.

I get it. I’ve been there. When you’re raising money in 2026, VCs expect AI somewhere in your stack. TechCrunch reports that 73% of pitch decks now mention AI, up from 12% in 2022. But here’s the thing: your investors aren’t your customers.

The Real Cost

Building AI features you don’t need burns more than money. It burns trust.

One SaaS founder I advise spent four months adding AI-generated email responses to their CRM. Four months. Their actual customers had been begging for better mobile sync for a year.

When they finally shipped the AI feature, adoption rate was 3%. Three percent! And half those users turned it off within a week.

Meanwhile, their competitor shipped mobile sync and poached 15 paying customers. At $400/month each, that’s $72k annual recurring revenue gone.

The founder learned an expensive lesson: features that look good in investor meetings don’t always translate to customer value.

How to Actually Think About AI

Don’t build AI features because they’re trendy. Build them because they solve a specific, painful problem better than anything else.

Ask yourself: Would this feature work better without AI? If the answer’s yes, skip the AI.

Example: You want to add search to your product. A traditional search with good indexing might be faster and more accurate than an AI-powered “natural language” search that hallucinates results. Ship the thing that works.

Here’s my test: Can you explain the AI feature’s value in one sentence without using the words “AI” or “machine learning”? If not, you’re building the feature because it’s AI, not because it’s useful.

The Exception

Sometimes AI genuinely is the best solution. I’ve seen this work.

A logistics startup I invested in used AI to predict delivery delays based on traffic patterns, weather, and historical data. Customers loved it because it meant fewer angry phone calls and better planning. The AI wasn’t a feature bolted on—it was the core value proposition.

Another company built AI-powered anomaly detection for manufacturing equipment. It caught problems before they became $200k production line failures. Real money saved. Real problem solved.

Notice the pattern? Both companies used AI to solve expensive, specific problems. Not to check a box on a pitch deck.

What Investors Actually Care About

Good investors care about traction, not buzzwords. They want to see revenue growth, customer retention, and clear paths to profitability.

If your AI feature drives those metrics, brilliant. Build it. But if you’re adding AI just to sound innovative, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

I’ve funded 14 companies. Never once have I invested because they mentioned AI. I invest when founders deeply understand their customers’ problems and build simple, effective solutions.

Sometimes those solutions involve AI. Usually they don’t.

The Fix

Stop reading AI hype pieces and start reading your customer support tickets. That’s where the real roadmap lives.

Survey your users. Ask them what they’d pay more for. I guarantee “AI-powered something” isn’t in the top five.

And if an investor pushes you to add AI features, push back. Show them your customer data. Explain why shipping what users actually want will drive better retention and revenue.

Most good investors will respect that. The ones who don’t? Probably aren’t worth taking money from anyway.

Bottom Line

AI isn’t magic. It’s a tool. Sometimes it’s the right tool. Often it’s not.

Your job as a founder isn’t to impress VCs with shiny tech. It’s to build something people will pay for. That means listening to customers, not trend pieces.

Build the boring stuff that works. Ship the features people ask for. Grow your revenue. The right investors will notice.

And if they don’t? You’ll have the cash flow to not care.