Menlo Venturesmenlovc.com · 16 September 2026

Key Findings Consumer AI adoption hardly grew even as spending tripled. The share of U.S. adults using AI rose just three points, from 61% to 64%, while global consumer spend reached an estimated $40 billion in 2026, more than 3x last year. The real growth came from existing users going deeper and paying more: 55% of AI users now pay for at least one AI product, and 46% of payers spend more than they did a year ago, versus 12% who spend less. Power users are driving consumer AI market growth: 55% of AI users now pay for AI, but spending is highly concentrated; the top 14% of payers account for 60% of spending. Payers are also nearly twice as likely to use AI daily (50% vs. 26%) and 5x as likely to use AI agents (65% vs. 13%). AI is becoming a source of income: Nearly half (48%) of AI users have earned money with AI, equivalent to roughly 30% of Americans. Consumers are handing AI more control: 41% of AI users have tried an AI agent, 24% use one regularly, and 32% have let AI act on their behalf without final approval. Among agent users, 92% pay for AI, and 63% use it daily. AI-generated conte

design.lightspark.comdesign.lightspark.com · 9 September 2026

Make every single detail perfect, and limit the number of details. The first half gets your attention. The second half is what makes it possible. Fewer details allow you to care more deeply about each one. By details, I don’t just mean the small visual decisions. Every feature, control, mode, state, exception, and bit of behavior becomes something a team has to design and someone has to understand. There’s only so much attention to go around. Same for time, taste, and patience. A button seems harmless enough, but someone has to decide where it goes, what it says, what it looks like, what happens when you press it, what happens when you can’t, and what happens after you do. Add another and now you don’t just have two buttons. You have the relationship between them. Nothing terrible happens when you add a third or a fourth. That’s kind of the problem. Keep going and eventually you’re not really designing the details anymore. You’re managing them. Complexity is a tax on craft. Less, but better Dieter Rams famously described good design as “less, but better.” We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the less. The better is more interesting. Two of Rams’ princ

Interconnectsinterconnects.ai · 9 September 2026

Housekeeping: Paid subscribers to Interconnects now get a permanent 40% discount on my book when purchasing at Manning.com. Access the code at the Interconnects perks page.Many AI optimists tend to compare what is happening in this AI boom to the industrial revolution, or to other periods of rapid technological advancement and diffusion into society. These comparisons fit on the scale of technological change, but miss a crucial factor in how most people are exposed to that change. The problem facing AI is that most people have no super tangible new goods thanks to it and society has more inertia resisting change than in previous eras.ShareI’m writing this coming back online from a few weeks off for my wedding in New England. In this time it would have been very easy to not think about AI at all. The touch-points that average people have to AI products today are fringe, marginally beneficial, or even just very confusing to them (e.g. many people have heard about and brought up the OpenAI-HuggingFace incident, but don’t know what to make of it). People on the positive side think of AI as a way to make fun images, enhanced Google Search, etc.

Dan Maccaroneuxdesign.cc · 26 August 2026

Technological efficiency meets high-end service: a luxury hotel lobby where AI-driven recommendations are seamlessly integrated into the check-in process, offering convenience while raising questions about the role of the human touch. Everyone’s spending a fortune making AI smarter. Hospitality and retail solved the part that actually matters, decades ago. The biggest tech companies on earth will spend close to seven hundred billion dollars this year building artificial intelligence. Microsoft alone is in for about a hundred and ninety billion in infrastructure. Even after spending that, it’s hedging on the intelligence itself. Its own product, Copilot, quietly swaps between ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Microsoft’s homegrown AI, picking whichever one fits the moment. Microsoft then told its customers not to get attached to any of them. That means the company pouring the most money into the intelligence itself is betting you won’t care which one answers you. It’s a good bet since you probably can’t tell which one wrote the email you read this morning. So, if the intelligence itself is going to be a commodity, there needs to be a better di

Jason Hanmedium.com · 3 August 2026

17 min readJul 23, 2026--We assume good design brings joy. Duolingo proved that engineering anxiety is a far more effective retention strategy.The notification arrived at exactly eight forty two in the evening. I was sitting on my couch, entirely absorbed in a television show, when my phone screen lit up. The message was simple. The owl looked slightly disappointed. The text read that I was neglecting my Spanish lessons.I did not feel delighted. I did not feel motivated. I felt a sharp, distinct pang of guilt.I closed the television. I opened the application. I completed a three minute lesson I did not actually need to finish, just to make the notification stop. Just to make the owl look happy again.After I locked my phone, I sat in the silence of my living room and realized something profound. I had just been manipulated by a piece of software. But more importantly, I had just experienced the exact mechanism that makes this company a billion dollar powerhouse.For the past decade, the product design industry has been obsessed with a single, elusive concept. We call it delight. We design fri