AI Native

Remember when "cloud native" was the hot term and nobody could quite pin down what it meant? Same thing is happening with "AI native." It's one of those phrases that's easy to let slip by and unconsciously substitute something vague: "something something AI." But precise language matters, especially when you're deciding what to build.

The cloud era offers a useful parallel. There's a clear distinction between software that can run on the cloud and software that takes full advantage of its abstractions. One is cloud-enabled. The other is cloud-native. Databases make a good example. You can grab PostgreSQL and install it on your own computer. Presto, a database. Or you can rent a server in the cloud and install it there. But it's still a single piece of software running on a single machine. In contrast, sign up for AWS Aurora and all the server stuff is abstracted away. That's the cloud-native version.

For AI, the distinction is more subtle than the vast architectural choices of cloud services. It comes down to where AI shows up in the product, how deeply it shapes the workflow, and how essential it is to delivering value. The clearest sign a product is AI-native: without the AI, it doesn't just become less useful. It stops making any sense at all.

Take Todoist. I love the AI features in the task manager, but the core workflow of creating and managing tasks doesn't need them. Remove the AI and the product still works fine.

Decidedly AI-native in an obvious (and therefore uninteresting) way are apps that are a user interface on top of a model. ChatGPT makes no sense without the underlying AI, but it doesn't add any sophisticated orchestration to it either.

Where it gets interesting: AI-native products that bring workflow orchestration and thoughtful user experience design to the table. Think Claude Code. It's far more than an interface to the underlying model. But without that model, it's nothing.

One is not inherently better than the other. For certain tasks, users prefer a mostly traditional workflow with the occasional AI assist. For others, they'll love the hands-off way an AI-native product performs work on their behalf.

What matters: pick the one that's right for your problem and apply it intentionally. Don't build an AI-native solution where AI-enabled would do fine. And don't slap a chatbot into your app and call it AI-native.