You don’t have a “skill issue.” AI is just poorly designed

I’ve been feeling tired lately. Tired of keeping up with new AI products and features announced every week or so. It’s been super hard to stay up-to-date with what the top 5-7 tech companies are releasing, let alone what the small AI startups are doing.

At first, I thought it was a skill issue. Everyone seems to be on top of things except me. But recently it dawned on me: it's not my skill issue, AI is just poorly designed.

Before I make my case for why AI is poorly designed, read the list of new products and features Google announced at I/O 2026:

Models

Platforms & Developer Tools

Search

Shopping

Gemini App

Creative Tools

Workspace

Science

Safety

This is what Google has already shipped or what it will ship in the near future. And that’s just one company. There are other companies that will do the same. And Google will surely ship more than what’s listed here within the next year.

Raymond Loewy is often called the father of industrial design. He designed a lot of iconic things, like the Coca-Cola bottle and the interiors of NASA spacecraft. Loewy coined a design principle called MAYA, or Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable.

This principle states that humans are caught between two opposite forces:

When designing a new product, designers have to cater to both of these forces. The product should have some novel angle to it, but it cannot be so novel that the users don’t feel comfortable using it.

When the world shifted from simple buttons to the iPhone's multi-touch screen, it was skeuomorphism (designing digital interfaces to look like their physical counterparts) that kept them comfortable enough to try the novel concept of multi-touch screens. Thanks to MAYA, that shift happened relatively smoothly.

The velocity of AI progress offers novelty. But it offers nothing to soothe the deep-seated human fear of the unfamiliar. AI products practically didn’t exist before 2023. And now, a mere three years later, an average user is supposed to use and accept dozens of new AI products/features/interfaces every month?

I am an average user; testing new AI products isn't my full-time job. Had that been my job, not staying up-to-date would have been considered a skill issue. But since that’s not the case, I call it a failure of tech companies to follow a well-established design principle.

I am not trying to throw shade at AI companies. They are acting this way because they are caught in an existential race. My purpose here is to tell you, the average user, that it’s okay if you are feeling exhausted with staying up-to-date. Raymond Loewy predicted our exhaustion decades ago.