Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I'm reading that right, 60% of their users give up after the first week, half of those who stick with it give up after another month or two, and then there appears to be continued decline afterwards. Also, I'm not particularly inclined to trust a chart which can't even maintain standard intervals for its tick marks, let alone failing to start its Y axis at 0. Seriously, how much do you have to twist your chart sof…
Excel defaults to automatically adjusting both axis ranges. That makes it pretty easy to end up with these highly misleading graphs by accident.
AI Market Clarity
31–40 of 105 posts
Re: AI Market Clarity
#32Customer Service keeps being touted as a success story of LLMs, but as a business owner and user I'd be very curious to see if it actually improves any UX CS metrics (NPS, CSAT) - as my experiences with AI chatbots are almost always negative. It can certainly frustrate visitors into using email or abandoning their efforts altogether, but at least for my business we've found current platforms aren't able to navigate t…
Many companies cleverly solve this issue by not having an email address in the first place.
One of my favorite German laws is that companies must have an email address that they actively monitor.
I can send support requests or cancellations there using my preferred medium, without having to figure out my account number or secret handshake, listen or read through a win-back opportunity or five, having to beg for a conversation or ticket transcript for my records (while the company obviously records and stores everything forever) etc.
Re: AI Market Clarity
#33Re: AI Market Clarity
#34I think the companion market is probably the most overlooked market in AI. Character AI is the most used AI app after ChatGPT worldwide, and generally what all the teens associate AI with. I am seeing companies like Dippy AI (character ai competitor for gen-z) scale from 0->10M+ users rapidly without many people noticing.
The churn is brutal. Once people have gotten over the novelty of an AI companion they quickly grow disatisified with the limitations and leave. It’s a lot like a game that people play with for a bit then leave when they’ve done everything they can do.
There may be high retention use cases that find ways to serve user needs without embarrassing them.
Re: AI Market Clarity
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
The churn is brutal. Once people have gotten over the novelty of an AI companion they quickly grow disatisified with the limitations and leave. It’s a lot like a game that people play with for a bit then leave when they’ve done everything they can do.
That's not what the numbers coming from some of these companies say — for example, chai app, publicly shares that their W52 retention is 20%. So, 20% of users who send a message just retain forever. Source: https://www.chai-research.com/chai_roadmap_2025.pdf
Is user retention an ergodic process? Clearly no. From economic first principles, we know elasticity of demand is going to depend upon substitutability and disposable income of the user base. Both of these can and do change over time. From empirical results elsewhere, we can simply look at products that have existed for more than a single year and observe that user retention rates in 1995 did not always match retention rates for the same product in 2002.
Here we get measurement of a single cohort that has actually reached 50 weeks. Are they representative of a typical cohort? We have no way to know. And again, fair, this is the best the company can possibly do. They can't create data that doesn't exist and they can't draw conclusions that have no hard evidence for or against. But you don't need to draw unwarranted conclusions, either. It's also 15% at 50 weeks retention in that first cohort, not 20% at 52 weeks. Does that mean those 15% of users will stick around forever? We have no idea. Sort of. We actually know for certain they won't because they're mortal and will die. Setting that aside, might they at least become lifelong users? I suppose it's possible, but even real-world friendships rarely last a lifetime. Will the next cohort at least still show 15% at 50 weeks? We yet again have no idea.
Re: AI Market Clarity
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience has been pretty great: I regularly chat with the Dott support robot because their shitty app lets you book a ride without camera access, but then the in-app flow doesn't let you end the ride without camera access. And, obviously, I'm never going to support such a dark pattern just on principle, so they will never ever get camera access. That means after every trip, I copy&paste "dear robot, no camera, p…
This comment is a dire indictment of the state of capitalism from start to end.
Re: AI Market Clarity
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
The churn is brutal. Once people have gotten over the novelty of an AI companion they quickly grow disatisified with the limitations and leave. It’s a lot like a game that people play with for a bit then leave when they’ve done everything they can do.
Maybe. FWIW the majority of the apps that have taken off are basically AI girlfriends/AI boyfriends. Using these is fundamentally a shameful act which probably deflates retention. There may be high retention use cases that find ways to serve user needs without embarrassing them.
Re: AI Market Clarity
#38Customer Service keeps being touted as a success story of LLMs, but as a business owner and user I'd be very curious to see if it actually improves any UX CS metrics (NPS, CSAT) - as my experiences with AI chatbots are almost always negative. It can certainly frustrate visitors into using email or abandoning their efforts altogether, but at least for my business we've found current platforms aren't able to navigate t…
The other day I was waiting in the lobby of a massage therapy place, and some older guy was checking in with the front desk. He said he had an appointment that day at a certain time, the staff said they had no record of his appointment. He said he booked it through the chat assistant on their website. I'm almost certain that the AI chatbot hallucinated a conversation of "booking an appointment" and told the guy he wa…
Re: AI Market Clarity
#39Re: AI Market Clarity
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe. FWIW the majority of the apps that have taken off are basically AI girlfriends/AI boyfriends. Using these is fundamentally a shameful act which probably deflates retention. There may be high retention use cases that find ways to serve user needs without embarrassing them.
If someone installed the app in the first place, aren't they already over that hurdle?