Software operators are shipping AI features that customers don’t use

Like broccoli on a finicky toddler’s dinner plate, AI features in business software are often left untouched.

According to a recent Banyan Software report, 51% of business software operators saw fewer than one in four customers use the AI capabilities that shipped with a software product. The findings are based on more than 260 survey responses from founders and CEOs of software companies that focus on vertical markets (i.e., specific industries).

What’s the cause? Max Risen, Banyan Software’s president of M&A, told IT Brew the low usage rates of AI features likely stem from companies “building for the sake of building and not necessarily building to solve specific problems.”

Risen added, “They’re building things that they think are really cool that customers will want, but more often than not, we found that they’re missing the mark of actually driving customer value.”

Déjà vu. Piyush Patel, chief ecosystem officer at AI search and retrieval platform Algolia, told IT Brew the issue of unused features is an old software industry problem, and has largely been driven by factors like industry competition and revenue pressure.

“If you think about your use of Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, or Excel, there are a million different features in there,” Patel said. “We know Control + C, Control + V for paste. We know how to do a formula here and there. There are so many things we’ve never used.”

However, Patel said, AI is now exacerbating the problem by making it easier than ever for software companies to ship out new features. “I can ship something tomorrow. It doesn’t take me three weeks of due diligence and a couple months of engineering and QA and release cycle.”

Simple solution. There’s a lot at stake for software companies that ship AI features that fail to garner attention.

“If you’re building features that actually operate and use tokens and require bigger, beefier infrastructure, that’s a problem if nobody uses it,” Patel said. “There’s money being spent for no reason.”

Risen recommends that software operators strive to solve customer problems when thinking about what features to implement into their product: “Now it’s a necessity for all companies to really understand what customers need to do to either help them drive revenue or save cost, or else I suspect a lot of these end customers will look to a technology partner who can do that for them.”