AI is everywhere. Being sold as the greatest human achievement. How might it do at doing endings and the complexities of off-boarding.

This week Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, presented the latest updates to Google’s Gemini AI. Within the celebratory examples of its achievements was a scenario of returning some recently purchased sneakers to a store.

Product leaders are easily persuaded that their product is the best. I worked in a big corporate company for a few years. They kept polishing the old operating system their past products had relied upon. Despite it never matching new competitor products entering the market. They just couldn’t end its life.

Walking through my building, and seeing a brand new drone box with a broken drone inside made me think about the consumer experience of these products. Broken quick enough to put it straight back in the packaging you only just unwrapped it from. Is it the quickest ending for a product?

Climate change is one of the biggest stories in recent history. It seems the hopeful story we told ourselves has ended.

A business account I use auto renewals 30 days before the service period starts. They have now locked me in until 2025. As a consumer I feel super trapped. Let’s look at this as an ending.

Let’s look at common product endings at Christmas.

Here are some of the highlights from 2023 for Endineering.

Of all the sectors in consumerism where you want reliability, few are more critical than the medical sector. Here the consumer experience needs to be solid, reliable and of course, if its going to end, it better be planned. Surprisingly even here the end is not as thought through as you might think.

It is nearly one hundred years since the pioneering home economist, author and consumer champion Christine Frederick defined the American Consumer approach. How have these ambitions aged in a world of too many products and a heating planet.

Over consumption to over donation: How Dan Browns Da Vinci Code reveals a global problem of giving away the crap in your wardrobe.

As the consumer and provider relationship breaks apart at the end, so does the support and instruction the consumer receives from that relationship. This leaves defining waste to be done alone, uninstructed. Therefore leaving disposability wide open to interpretation. If we consider the decision tree along the consumer lifecycle we can see emotions and purpose change from desired object and functional product, to unwanted burden. Where the consumer is encouraged at earlier stages to think individually and selfishly. At later stages they are asked to think altruistically and regard ongoing value. Clearly conflicting behaviours.