All my clients wanted a carousel.
Now it's an AI chatbot.
It always starts with a Slack message, or a screen share, or a PDF mood board assembled at 11pm. And somewhere in there is the thing — the one feature that's going to transform the website. I've been freelancing for over a decade. I've watched the thing change many times.
For years it was carousels. Every brief, without fail: rotating hero banners, autoplay every three seconds, five slides, each one a different call to action. I built beautiful carousels. The analytics were devastating — slide two at 3% engagement, slide five at statistically zero. None of that mattered. The carousel meant the site was serious, and that was that.
Then came video backgrounds. Then parallax. Then the quiz era (genuinely fun, no complaints). Then dark mode. Then — and this one still visits me at night — the brief that just said "can we make it more Web3?"
The feature was never really about the users. It was about the client feeling like they were keeping up. The technology changes. The psychology doesn't.
And now it's AI chatbots. Every kickoff call, eventually: "We want something like ChatGPT but for our brand." What would users ask it? Everything. What's feeding it? The website, can't it just learn? Can we have it by Friday?
Here's the thing I've had to be honest with myself about though: unlike carousels — which were always solving a client problem, never a user problem — a well-built AI assistant genuinely can help people find what they need. The technology, when it fits, is remarkable. The mistake is assuming it always fits, and that bolting it on will quietly fix whatever else isn't working.
I used to push back harder. I'd show up with click-through data and case studies. I was right, and also frequently exhausting. Now I just ask better questions — not "why do you want this?" but "what does success look like in six months?" Sometimes the chatbot still happens. Sometimes we end up rebuilding the navigation instead, which is usually where the real problem lives.
Either way, I've made my peace with it. Every era taught me something: carousels gave me CSS transitions, video backgrounds introduced me to performance budgets, and whatever this AI moment becomes, I'm already learning things I'll carry forward. The job is to absorb the trend, understand it well enough to know when it helps, and try to steer toward something that'll still make sense in two years.
Sometimes you succeed. Sometimes you ship a carousel.
Forward this to whoever last sent you a brief that just said "like ChatGPT but for us." They'll enjoy it. Probably.