Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

AI's Gap Is a Product Design Failure

11 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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AI isn't held back by technical limits but by product design. We're building better spreadsheets when people actually want tools that help them feel connected, loved, and entertained. The real gap is between what we can build and what we choose to build.

Chapters

We believe that people want to be more productive, but they don't. I think more people want to spend time than save time. And it's really a product design failure. We have the capabilities to radically transform people's lives. Lenny, in many ways, we spent 40 years building a technology that enables better spreadsheets. And I think that we have a little bit of a spiritual hunger, especially as a lot of these cultural institutions have gone away that fulfilled that. So I think that the opportunity for this technology is like, hey, that the basics of consumer need— how do we feel more connected, more loved? How do we make progress? How do we have fun? Like the things that we all aspire to, the basics, how do we apply this technology to those areas? That's what I want to see more of. And again, I don't think it's a model or a capability challenge. It's just a product design challenge.