Mia stared at the Slack thread, stomach twisting. Week three after launch at Pulse. The AI meeting summarizer had just hallucinated an action item. “Follow up with legal on the $1.2M expansion deal,” it assigned to the wrong director. The customer replied: “This is creative writing, not my meeting.”
Day-one feedback had been fire emojis. Retention? Cratering. 68% of users opened a summary once and ghosted. The model scored 87% on internal eval. But real users brought chaos: overlapping voices, sarcasm, context in someone's head.
This wasn't a model problem. It was a design problem. Users don't care about your ROC curve. They care whether they can rely on the thing on a random Tuesday.
AI product sense — the muscle that lets you see failure modes weeks before users do, set quality bars that matter, and design experiences that earn trust.