Relay, an AI-powered workflow automation tool built as an alternative to Zapier, shut down on Monday. The product let users automate email and task workflows using AI agents, but as OpenAI, Google, and other larger platforms built similar automation directly into their own tools, five-year-old Relay tried to hold on to a reason to exist as a stand-alone product.
Relay is one version of the story playing out right now. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, about 42% of AI initiatives are abandoned by their corporate parents.
The result is an AI graveyard.
On July 9, OpenAI updated the app to combine several experiences, including separate “Chat,” “Codex,” and “Work” modes, while renaming the traditional, familiar version “ChatGPT Classic.”
The redesign quickly drew criticism from users who found the new interface confusing and cluttered, and OpenAI rolled back the change soon after, bringing the familiar ChatGPT interface back.
ChatGPT Atlas, a stand-alone AI-powered web browser, lasted less than a year before being discontinued on August 9, with its most useful features absorbed into ChatGPT.
We also can’t forget its video-sharing platform, Sora, which tried with high operating costs and user-retention challenges and shut down in March 2026.
When Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence in 2024, an improved Siri was one of the highlighted features.
Announced at its 2024 Build developer conference, Microsoft’s Recall feature was pitched as an AI-powered “photographic memory” for Windows PCs, periodically taking screenshots of what a user was doing so they could later search back through their own digital history.