IBM's $3M AI Chatbot Orders Laptops While Creativity Dies
Last week I watched IBM demo their latest breakthrough: an AI chatbot that processes laptop orders. Not poetry. Not art. Laptop orders.
Welcome to 2026, where AI went from "revolutionary creativity tool" to "slightly better IT helpdesk." And honestly? That might be the most honest thing that's happened to AI yet.
The Great AI Hangover Hits
Jonas Plaisted's brutal piece "AI Makes You Boring" landed right as the industry faces what Jon Gingerich calls the "slopocalypse" - a flood of bot-generated content drowning everything interesting online.
The numbers tell the real story:
- 85% of AI projects fail after 6-9 months and millions spent
- CES 2026's "AI of ROI" sessions focused on HR chatbots
- Newsrooms found manual labor cheaper than AI for many tasks
Fergus Bell from Fathm, who's worked with 150+ newsrooms, nailed it:
<> "Innovation emerges from understanding AI limits, not hype; newsrooms now calibrate tasks (minutes vs. hours), prioritizing responsible integration over 'cool' solutions."/>
Why Your Feed Feels Like Suburban Hell
Here's what's actually happening: LLMs favor high-probability tokens. They're designed to be predictable. When you ask ChatGPT to write something "creative," it's literally calculating the most statistically average response.
The result? Homogenized slop everywhere.
- Blog posts that read like they came from the same template
- Social media captions with identical "engaging" questions
- Marketing copy that sounds like it was focus-grouped to death
Psychology Today warned us in December: AI's predictive nature doesn't just make content boring - it makes us boring when we rely on it.
The Boring Winners Are Actually Winning
But here's the twist I didn't see coming. While creative AI implodes, boring AI thrives.
IBM's laptop-ordering chatbot? That actually works. It handles deterministic tasks perfectly:
1. Employee needs laptop
2. Bot processes request
3. Order gets placed
4. Done.
No creativity required. No "hallucinations." Just reliable, mundane automation.
Reflect Digital predicts 2026's "hype hangover" will favor exactly these kinds of reliable automation wins over flashy demos. The companies plastering genAI over broken processes are failing. The ones fixing specific pain points are succeeding.
The Real Developer Opportunity
As developers, we're at a crossroads. The hype machine wants us building the next ChatGPT killer. But the money is in:
- Back-office automation that saves actual time
- Process improvement with clear ROI metrics
- Integration tools that work seamlessly with existing workflows
Google's winning not because they have the best model, but because they have the best distribution. Their AI tools just appear in your workflow.
Fighting the Slop
Some argue humans made content boring first - AI just amplifies it. Maybe. But that doesn't mean we surrender.
The antidote to AI boring:
- Rapid iteration on real data (not 9-month infrastructure builds)
- Prompt engineering for specificity, not generic output
- Using AI as a tool, not a replacement for thinking
The developers who understand this distinction will build the tools that matter.
My Bet: By end of 2026, the most successful "AI companies" will be the ones that stopped calling themselves AI companies. They'll just be software companies that happen to use ML for specific, boring problems. And their users will love them for it.
