The Internet Is Exhausting. AI Will Be the Filter That Saves It.
There’s a quiet burnout happening with digital products right now. Not loud or dramatic, just a slow, cumulative exhaustion that comes from being constantly online, constantly searching, constantly asked to engage.
Search is a good example of digital burnout. Google, once the front door to the internet, feels completely broken. Try shopping for anything and you’ll be served the same three products over and over again, despite the fact that millions of options exist. The internet has never been more abundant, yet discovery has never felt narrower. It’s no coincidence that Gen Z has started opting out. They search on TikTok. They ask ChatGPT. They rely on Instagram. They’ve already decided that traditional search is not worth the effort. At the same time, we’re all drowning in digital noise. Multiple email inboxes. Instagram DMs. iMessages. Slack. Endless pings from every direction. The idea that we should also spend our free time scrolling, browsing, and hunting for products on websites feels almost cruel. Being online has gone from convenient to claustrophobic.
On weekends, I want to be offline. Fully. And I don’t think I’m alone. There’s a growing desire to step away from screens because the internet has become too vast, too loud, and too mentally demanding. Online shopping reflects this shift perfectly. Years ago, browsing was part of the joy. I’d casually explore a site, discover new things, and linger. That behavior is gone. Today, shopping online is transactional. Get in, get out. I don’t want to scroll for fun anymore. I’m already exhausted before I open the tab. Ironically, this has pushed me back into physical stores. Limited inventory. Finite space. Faster decisions. Less cognitive overload. It’s calmer. I know I won’t lose half a day staring at a screen. And this is coming from someone who has spent most of their career building ecommerce experiences. Which is why I think the future of ecommerce looks radically different from what we’ve designed for the past decade.
I don’t believe people will be casually surfing brand websites five years from now. Discovery will happen elsewhere, organically, through culture, creators, and feeds. When something resonates, we’ll buy it directly. One-to-one. No wandering. No hunting. The uncomfortable truth for brands is this. People do not want to spend time on your website. They don’t want to explore it. They want to get what they need and move on. This is where AI fundamentally changes the game. Instead of humans sifting through a chaotic internet, we’ll delegate that work to personal AI avatars. Bots trained deeply on our tastes, preferences, values, constraints, and past behavior. Not generic recommendation engines, but personalized digital proxies that understand us better than any algorithm ever could. You won’t search anymore. You’ll ask. “Find me three couches that fit my space, my taste, my budget.” And you’ll get three results. Not thirty pages. Not sponsored junk. Three options that actually make sense.
These bots will become the keepers of the internet. They’ll crawl the deep, messy corners we can’t reach. They’ll surface niche products from small shops halfway across the world instead of recycling the same top-ranked results. Their job will be to navigate the digital swamp we created because they can do it faster, cleaner, and without burning us out. This also means the internet itself has to change. Products will need to be tagged with extreme precision. Metadata will matter more than visual polish. Voice interfaces will matter more than front-end UI. Crawlers, not humans, will increasingly be the primary audience of the web. And yes, I think the traditional website, at least as we know it today, will fade. Not because the internet disappears, but because staring at screens all day is unsustainable. Voice, ambient computing, and AI-mediated access feel like the inevitable correction.
Someday, future generations will probably laugh at us for sitting at desks, cracking open laptops, and spending hours manually searching a broken internet. It will seem absurd that we tethered ourselves to physical devices just to find a product. The next era isn’t about better browsing. It’s about not browsing at all.