A few years ago, AI was just ambient noise, a low hum in the distance. Now it’s the only song playing, and everyone is listening on loop. In the elite tech circles it’s all about the model numbers and context windows. Investors are chasing anything with a .ai domain. That well meaning friend keeps insisting you must do something-something-AI to stay relevant. The news says it’s coming for all our jobs. Your cousin uses it for her 10th standard homework. And your kid is fascinated by voice models that sound like cartoon characters.
From edtech to elections, astrology to AI-powered condoms (yes, it exists), everyone is riding the AI wave. We’re firmly in the AI hype cycle. And honestly? It’s well deserved.
I work in AI. I build with it. I’m a practitioner. And yes, to avoid sounding too meta, I’m also building an AI-first company.
But I still can’t wait for this to get boring.
Let me explain.
The Normalization of Wonder
This might sound strange coming from someone building an AI-first company. But I’ve seen this before.
In the late 90s, the personal computer took over the world. And I was lucky to be early. I was one of the very few in my school who had a PC at home. A chunky CRT monitor. Tangled wires. It made me curious. It made me feel ahead. I rode the wave.
I still remember Appa talking about “church engines on computers” and me being deeply confused. Why would a church need an engine? Only later did I realize he had misheard search engine. To be fair, the word “search” didn’t even exist in my digital vocabulary at the time. The first time I typed something into Google, it felt like magic.
There was the first time a friend told me he downloaded a movie using something called Torrent. It took 16 hours to get a 500 MB file, and we still watched it like it was science fiction. The time I heard someone had a color phone, and caught a bus just to see it. The first time I saw a webpage on a Nokia handset it took > 20 minutes to load, and we were still fascinated. The first touchscreen. The first broadband connection. Each one made you stop and say - this is the future.
Every new bit of technology felt magical. It had presence. It made you pause. It earned your attention.
But slowly, each of those things became boring.
And in that boredom, something beautiful happened.They became infrastructure.
I don’t marvel at PCs anymore. It feels like humanity has always had them (Didn’t we?).
I don’t celebrate streaming a movie. Isn’t that just how the world is supposed to work?
I don’t stare at touchscreens in wonder. Even toddlers seem to know what to do.
That’s the path of truly transformative tech. It starts as a spectacle but eventually becomes scaffolding. And that’s exactly where I think AI is headed.
And honestly, I can’t wait for it to get there.
Why Boring Is the Goal
Right now, AI still feels like it’s trying to prove something.
It announces itself loudly in every room. It slaps “AI” on every feature. Uses gradients, sparkles, and icons shaped like magic wands, just in case you didn’t notice the “intelligence.”
But if it follows the arc of every other major shift, we’ll stop talking about it soon. Not because it’s failed, but because it’s succeeded.
Because it will have faded into the fabric of our lives.
I don’t want AI to keep wowing me.
I want it to quietly work.
Boring AI won’t use the word “AI” five times on a settings page. It won’t need gradients and animations to feel useful. It won’t ask for your attention.
It’s no longer the hero in your movie. You are the hero, it’s the lighting technician, quietly essential but never in your spotlight.
The Best Tech Disappears
The thing about boring technology is, we only notice it when it’s missing. We don’t realize how much we depend on it until it’s gone. That is what I hope AI becomes.
Not a novelty. Not a trend. Just something that works across devices, platforms, and generations. Something our kids grow up using without needing to be taught. Like search. Like maps. Like electricity.
It won’t amaze us every day. But it will quietly hold things together in the background and give us space to do the things only we humans can: to break the pattern, to trust the gut, to love without logic, to decide without data and to live without being prompted.
While I realize we are in a breakthrough era in tech, and I'm just as excited about AI as everyone else, I’m also looking forward to the day it becomes ordinary and boring.
Because that’s when we’ll know it has truly arrived.