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TechCrunch's AI graveyard blames platform encroachment for one death in nine
Relay shut down on Monday after five years, outpaced by automation OpenAI and Google built into their own tools. The other entries on the list failed on cost, retention, privacy or engineering, and S&P Global counts competition as one abandonment cause in five.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Relay, an AI workflow automation tool sold as an alternative to Zapier, shut down entirely on Monday after five years of letting users automate email and task workflows with AI agents.
- TechCrunch attributes the shutdown to OpenAI, Google and other larger platforms building similar automation directly into their own tools, leaving Relay without a reason to exist on its own.
- OpenAI discontinued ChatGPT Atlas, its standalone AI browser, on August 9 after less than a year, moving the features it considered most useful into ChatGPT.
- OpenAI's July 9 redesign of the ChatGPT app into Chat, Codex and Work modes, with the old interface renamed ChatGPT Classic, drew user complaints about clutter and was rolled back soon after.
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Why it matters
- constraint Relay's five years narrow what a layer on top of a foundation model can charge for: if the platform owner needs a capability to sell its own model, the platform will eventually include it.
- decision Teams adding AI inside an existing product have to test it against the general agent their user already runs.
- exposure Customers who standardised email and task automation on Relay are the ones absorbing the cost of the shutdown, because the workflows have to be rebuilt somewhere else.
- precedent OpenAI's habit of retiring its own standalone apps into ChatGPT sets the expectation that any single-purpose AI app adjacent to a model is a candidate for absorption by whoever owns the model.
Notion shipped an inbox that sorted itself, then watched customers hand the sorting to something else. The product launched in April 2025 as an AI-focused email tool for organizing and automating inboxes, and TechCrunch reports that the company noticed its users were using separate AI agents on their email instead [14].
The rest of the list has other causes. Three entries were retired by OpenAI itself and folded into ChatGPT, including Operator and DALL-E's role as a separate place to make images [8][16]. Sora shut down in March 2026 after high operating costs and user-retention problems [9]. Microsoft delayed Recall for nearly a year over privacy and security, and a cybersecurity researcher recently built a tool that could extract and display data Recall had captured [12][13]. Apple's repeated Siri delays contributed to a $250 million settlement over how it marketed the iPhone 16's AI capabilities, and the AI Siri is reaching English-language users this month [10][11]. Of the nine products TechCrunch covers, Relay is the one whose stated cause is a rival platform building the same function in [15].
The 42% leaves the cause open. S&P Global Market Intelligence gives five reasons corporate parents abandon AI initiatives: insufficient funding, technical challenges, competition, difficulty scaling, and weak user demand [4]. Competition is one of the five [17], and the figure counts initiatives inside companies [3]. TechCrunch does not break the 42% down by cause.
The first test is whether the platform owner needs the capability to make its own model more useful to people who already pay for it; email and task automation was in that category for OpenAI and Google, on TechCrunch's reading of why Relay ran out of room [2]. The second is whether the value survives a user pointing a general-purpose agent at the same data and the same permissions.
If the platform needs the capability and a general agent can reach your data, the feature is on someone else's release schedule. If neither holds, the platform can ship the feature and still not do the job, because what you sell is a permission or an audit record the agent cannot obtain on the user's behalf. Check retention for the cohort that already runs a general agent.
What to watch
- Whether Notion keeps Mail's own AI features or opens the inbox to third-party agents.
- The next OpenAI standalone app to be discontinued, and what its users get to export.
- Whether S&P Global publishes a breakdown of the 42% by cause of abandonment.