OCTOBER 9, 2026
Welcome to the AI Assistant War Where Help Might Become Impossible To Avoid
YouTube creator has tools to help you optimize your videos. Kroger has an AI grocery shopping assistant. DoorDash has an AI bot that can “order the usual.” Instagram is adding an AI assistant to teach you how to post better. Meanwhile, apps like Instinct, Boardy and Haven are getting a lot of attention as personal assistant bots that can help accomplish a variety of tasks on your behalf from answering emails to making introductions. We are headed toward an AI assistant war where every tool you use and every interaction will be infused with help ... whether you want it or not. There is some precedence for this.
Microsoft introduced Clippy back in the early days of Microsoft Office and he was pretty universally hated for popping up unwanted in every situation. Now AI will give us a modern and perhaps more annoying version in every interaction.
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How It All Started
A Short Backstory Of This Blog
This is a blog about non-obvious ideas. Originally launched on the Typepad platform in 2005 as the Influential Marketing blog, the stories at first focused mainly on digital marketing while Rohit worked at Ogilvy Advertising. In 2015 Rohit officially rebranded to the Non-Obvious Insights Blog and published his WSJ bestseller Non-Obvious. For the past twenty one years, this blog has coined new terms, introduced future marketing practices and inspired the next generation of non-obvious thinkers and marketers.
