The AI graveyard: products and startups that didn't survive

Not every AI product lives up to the hype. Relay, an AI workflow automation tool built as an alternative to Zapier, shut down entirely in August. The product let users automate email and task workflows using AI agents, but as OpenAI, Google, and other larger platforms built similar automation directly into their own tools, the five-year-old Relay struggled to hold on to a reason to exist as a stand-alone product.

Plenty of AI bets never even survive inside the companies that build them. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, about 42% of AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned by their corporate parents. The reasons vary: insufficient funding, technical challenges, competition, difficulty scaling, or just weak user demand.

Even the biggest players aren't immune. OpenAI has shut down several stand-alone apps and folded their features directly into ChatGPT. ChatGPT Atlas, a stand-alone AI-powered web browser, lasted less than a year before being discontinued on August 9, with its most useful features absorbed into ChatGPT. The company did the same thing with Operator, an AI agent that could browse the web and complete tasks on a user's behalf, and OpenAI has increasingly built image generation directly into ChatGPT, shrinking the role of DALL-E as its own separate destination for creating images.

Apple's improved Siri, a headline feature of Apple Intelligence unveiled in 2024, was repeatedly pushed back, with the company citing engineering issues and bugs. The new AI-powered version finally appeared in the iOS 27 beta this past July, rolling out to English-language users first this month, with support for other languages expected to follow.

Microsoft's Recall, announced at its 2024 Build developer conference, was pitched as an AI-powered "photographic memory" for Windows PCs, periodically taking screenshots of what a user was doing so they could later search back through their own digital history. The announcement triggered an immediate backlash over privacy and security, and Microsoft delayed the feature for nearly a year to rethink its protections. Even after a redesign, the controversy hasn't gone away: a cybersecurity researcher recently built a tool that could extract and display data that Recall had captured.

Notion Mail launched in April 2025 as an AI-focused email product designed to help users organize and automate their inboxes. However, the company noticed its users were using separate AI agents to handle their email instead. As a result, Notion Mail is scheduled to shut down on September 22.

The Humane AI Pin is probably one of the most well-known failures in AI hardware. Designed to provide AI features through a wearable device rather than a traditional smartphone, Humane raised $230 million from investors and garnered significant attention. But the product struggled with performance, and the situation worsened when Humane warned customers to stop using its charging case because of a potential battery fire risk. Humane then shut down its AI Pin business in February 2025, with most of the company's assets acquired by HP for $116 million.

The Rabbit R1 was another heavily hyped AI device. Unveiled at CES in January 2024, the AI companion was designed to perform tasks on behalf of its owner, and Rabbit said it had sold 100,000 units shortly after launch. Early reviews, however, described the device as unfinished, with unreliable performance and a limited number of useful integrations. The company hasn't given up: it has continued updating the R1, positioning it as a computer controller capable of performing agentic tasks, and recently announced a new hardware project dubbed "Project Cyberdeck," aimed at creating a portable device built for vibe-coding.

Figgs AI operated from 2023 to 2024, letting users create and interact with customizable AI characters for role-play and storytelling. The platform reportedly drew more than 1 million users, but its developers said keeping the service free became too expensive to sustain, and they shut it down.

Source: TechCrunch