AI washing is the new way to get funded.
A similar thing happened during the dot.com bubble in 2000.
Companies added ‘.com’ to their name and the valuation doubled.
Today you connect a GPT API, put ‘AI-powered’ in the deck, and do the same thing.
Different era. Same game.
Here is what is actually happening inside most of these products:
➡️ A chatbot sitting on top of a CRM that was never built for AI
➡️ An automation layer on a workflow tool from another era.
➡️ A GPT wrapper connected to a system that still runs batch processing overnight.
That is not AI-native. It’s a bridge held together by connectors, plugins, and workarounds.
And every weak connection is a failure point waiting for real conditions.
This is why so many AI products look impressive in a demo and struggle in production.
As someone who has built and invested in technology businesses for over twenty years, what concerns me is that many companies have genuinely convinced themselves they are building AI products.
If you are a founder building an AI product, or planning to, ask yourself  how can you be truly AI-native.
That question changes the data model, the workflows, the team, the speed of the whole system.