All my clients wanted a carousel, now it's an AI chatbot

Enterprise clients are increasingly demanding AI chatbots not because they solve actual business problems, but as a status signal to appear modern and competitive—mirroring past cycles of carousel adoption and analytics implementations that delivered minimal ROI. This trend reflects a misalignment between perceived digital maturity (feature-rich but bloated) and actual user experience value, creating technical debt and maintenance burden that masks underlying usability problems. IT leaders must recognize this pressure as symptomatic of broader technology adoption patterns driven by competitive anxiety rather than strategic business outcomes.