Elissa Craig

I will go first.

Here are five trends that I think are overrated, based on watching hundreds of startups build, scale, and sometimes fail.

1. AI replacing all customer support.

The hype says AI agents will handle 90% of tickets. The reality is different.

Today, I read a study showing that social media use is linked to weaker reading, vocabulary, and word-recognition skills in teens under 16.
Yesterday, I read an article saying that students who used AI showed up to 55% less brain activity and remembered less.
According to the news, if this is what technology was supposed to help us with and make our lives easier, then I don t see the future very brightly.

On the contrary, I have to say that I use AI for education (e.g. for building, explaining things when I do not understand them). But 80% of people just take the information and do not bother to think about other things.
Yes, we can save a lot of time, and mental capacity/energy with "no memorising" but do we really spend that saved time on something useful and meaningful?

I'll go first.

I still reply to every comment manually. Reddit, LinkedIn, Product Hunt, forums, Twitter, Discord. Every single one.

AI could do this. There are tools that generate replies, post on schedule, analyze sentiment, even mimic your brand voice. But I don't use them. Here's why.

A 2024 study on community engagement across 500 brands found that personalized responses drive 3.2x higher retention and 4.7x more repeat interactions than automated replies. People can tell when a response is copy-pasted. They can feel when no one actually read their comment. The average user only needs 2-3 automated interactions before they disengage entirely.