Stop Slapping AI on Everything

“Stop slapping AI on everything”

I walked the floor of a major healthcare conference in Nashville recently and played a game. I counted the booths that didn't mention AI. I ran out of fingers pretty quickly, because there weren't any.

This isn't an anti-AI post. It's about why saying less about it might actually be the smartest move you make.

AI fatigue is real, and it's not talked about enough. Everyone sees AI everywhere and honestly, people are sick of it. Which is wild to say out loud because AI is genuinely incredible. It can solve problems 10x faster than we can, it's changing entire industries, and anyone who says otherwise isn't paying attention. But there's a difference between something being powerful and something being overused as a buzzword.

At the conference, Tim Buchanan walked up to our booth and told us about Nectar, the only company he walked up to that did not mention AI. Think about that for a second. Not mentioning AI was the thing that made a booth stand out. That's where we are right now.

So what's actually going on? Most of what people are seeing isn't really AI. It's a thin layer slapped on top of an existing model, rebranded, and pitched as a revolution. Buyers know the difference. They've seen the pitch too many times. C-suite executives in healthcare aren't impressed by the word anymore. What they're really asking is "okay, but what does it actually do for my specific problem?"

That's the difference between AI as a feature and AI as a foundation. A feature is bolted on. It works sometimes, impresses in demos, and disappears when things get hard. A foundation is built into how the product actually functions. It's not a selling point, it's just how things work. One creates skepticism. The other creates trust.

Specificity wins. "We use AI" means nothing but “Our AI cuts your nurse rehire cost by X" means everything. I think that fatigue is actually an opportunity. If everyone is shouting AI and you're showing real outcomes, you stand out.

I use AI, you probably use AI, everyone at that conference uses AI. The goal was never to stop, it's to be specific enough that when you say it, people actually believe you.