When Useful Becomes "AI-Powered"
A search bar that returns relevant results is useful. It is not AI. But somewhere between the roadmap and the release notes it becomes an "AI-powered experience" and nobody says anything, because questioning it feels like questioning the future itself.
The inflation matters because it flattens the real thing. Products doing something genuinely interesting, orchestration logic, deterministic preanalysis, figuring out where LLM judgment is actually warranted versus where a simpler system does the job better at a fraction of the cost, get collapsed into the same category as a fancier dropdown.
The distinction is interesting enough that it doesn't need the hype.