Open your favorite super-app right now. I guarantee you’ll see a shiny new ‘AI Assistant’ button slapped right on the homepage. Alipay has one. Taobao has one. Meituan, Xiaohongshu, Amap—they all want you to chat with them.
But here’s the dirty secret: Nobody wants a conversation with their map app. They just want to get to the damn airport.
We are currently living through the era of ‘AI-washing.’ Companies are so terrified of missing the hype train that they’re force-feeding chatbots into interfaces where they don’t belong. They aren’t solving problems; they’re adding a ‘typing tax’ to your life.
Let’s look at what’s actually happening. You open Meituan to order food. Instead of clicking the clearly labeled ‘Coupons’ button, the app wants you to type out, ‘Find me a discount for noodles nearby.’ That’s not innovation. That’s just replacing a one-click operation with a five-sentence dialogue. It’s a pseudo-need disguised as progress.
If your AI just replaces a search bar with a chat box, you haven’t innovated. You’ve just added a typing tax.
So, when is AI in an app actually a real need? It only works when it acts as an efficient matching layer connecting your vague, messy human intent to the platform’s massive, fragmented backend of services.
Think about Alipay. It’s a super-app with hundreds of features—payments, investments, transit, medical records. Half the time, you don’t know where to find what you need. Alipay’s AI isn’t just a chatbot; it’s a routing engine. You say, ‘Help me figure out where my money went this month,’ and it pulls your transaction data, analyzes it, and connects you to the billing dashboard. That’s useful. It saved you from navigating five sub-menus.
But here is the dark, twisted reality of why most app AI fails. It’s not a technology problem. It’s a business model problem.
Consider Taobao’s AI shopping assistant. It’s designed to help you compare products, understand complex parameters, and find the absolute best coupons. Sounds great, right? But traditional e-commerce platforms make money on information opacity. They make money from ad placements, sponsored listings, and hoping you don’t find the cheaper alternative.
If an AI truly acts in the user’s best interest, it becomes a direct threat to the platform’s traditional ad revenue.
If Taobao’s AI perfectly analyzes your needs and finds you the cheapest, highest-quality item, it bypasses the sponsored sellers who paid for the top spot. The platform loses money. This is the paradox of platform AI: to truly serve the user by eliminating information asymmetry, the AI must cannibalize the very ad business that funds it.
Because of this tension, most apps build AI that is intentionally lobotomized. It can chat, but it won’t execute. It will give you a text answer, but it won’t pull the lever on the backend to actually book the ticket, apply the coupon, or process the refund. It’s a glorified FAQ bot.
Xiaohongshu’s AI tries to summarize community notes, but it struggles with the subjective nature of user-generated content. Amap’s AI can suggest a weekend trip, but if you just need to navigate, the chat interface is slower than the traditional map view.
The ultimate test of any AI feature is brutally simple. The ultimate test of an AI assistant isn’t how smart it sounds, but what manual steps it made disappear.
Did it save you from searching? Did it stop you from switching between three different pages? Did it reduce the number of decisions you had to make?
If an AI feature doesn’t reduce friction, it’s just a marketing gimmick. Stop forcing us to chat. Just make the app work.
FAQ
Q: What makes an AI assistant a pseudo-need?
A: When it takes a one-click operation and turns it into a five-sentence dialogue. If the AI just replaces a search bar with a chat box without actually executing the backend service, it's a gimmick.
Q: Why don't platforms just build AI that actually helps us?
A: Because truly helpful AI destroys their ad revenue. If an e-commerce AI finds you the absolute cheapest, best item, it bypasses sponsored listings and ad placements. Platforms make money on information opacity.
Q: Is there any app doing AI right?
A: Apps with massive, fragmented backend services—like Alipay. When AI acts as a routing engine that connects your vague intent (e.g., 'where did my money go?') to a specific dashboard, it actually saves you time.