There’s a meeting happening right now at some company — maybe yours — where someone is saying “we can’t do this because part of our user base is anti-AI.”

And everyone nods. Notes get taken. The feature gets shelved. And it gets called playing it safe.

It’s not safe. It’s surrender.

What “Anti-AI Users” Actually Means

When someone says “our users are anti-AI,” what they’re really saying is: a vocal minority has an opinion, and we’re going to let that opinion drive our product decisions.

That’s not user research. That’s capitulation dressed up as strategy.

Vocal minorities are loud by definition. The people who are fine with something don’t write in to tell you they’re fine with it. They just use it. The people who hate something write essays, post in forums, and reply-all. If you’re measuring sentiment by noise level, you’re going to overweight the opposition every single time — and the people who actually wanted the feature will just find another product that built it. No drama. No angry emails. They’re just gone.

That’s the part that never shows up in the meeting.

AI Is Already Everywhere

The person who says they’re anti-AI is almost certainly using it right now without knowing it. Their email client suggests replies. Their phone unlocks with their face. Their GPS reroutes them in real time. Their streaming service decides what to recommend. Their bank flags fraud before they do.

AI isn’t coming. The debate was over before most of these meetings happened.

When we treat “anti-AI users” as a fixed, permanent segment that needs protecting, we’re building strategy around a fiction. We’re not shielding people from something new. We’re shielding them from noticing something that’s been there for years. And we’re punishing everyone else in the process.

What Pumping the Brakes Actually Costs You

Let’s say you slow down. You add friction, disclaimers, opt-outs. You make the “safe” choice.

You haven’t made your anti-AI users happy — nothing was going to make them happy. They’re not going to become advocates. No one is writing a glowing review about how you respected their preferences. They’re going to complain about the next thing.

But you have fallen behind.

In a space moving this fast, “behind” isn’t a temporary condition you recover from. Every sprint you skip is compounding debt. The gap between you and the teams that kept moving isn’t linear — it’s exponential.

Who Are We Actually Building For?

This is the question that never gets asked.

When you slow down for the loudest objectors, you’re making a choice about who matters most. You’re saying the person who sends angry feedback outweighs the person who quietly churned because you never built what they needed. That’s backwards.

These users are not your growth. They’re not your future. They’re a shrinking slice of a user base that’s going to get used to this whether they want to or not — same as every technology shift before it. You can’t build a product for 2026 by negotiating with people who want 2018.

“But What If We Alienate Them?”

Offer them a choice, not a compromise.

There’s a massive difference between “we’re not building this” and “we built it, here’s how to turn it off.” Give people agency without holding everyone else hostage to the most conservative preference in the room.

And honestly, most of the time the resistance isn’t even about AI. It’s about change. It’s about not understanding what’s happening under the hood and therefore not trusting it. That’s a product and communication problem — not a reason to stop building. Make it better. Make it clearer. Make it trustworthy. AI being imperfect is an argument for building more thoughtfully, not an argument for stopping.

The Thing Nobody Wants to Say

Sometimes “our users are anti-AI” is a proxy for “we’re scared to move this fast” or “we don’t have the infrastructure yet” or “leadership hasn’t bought in.”

Those are real problems. They deserve honest conversations.

But dressing them up as user advocacy? That’s not strategy. That’s cover.

So Here’s Where We Are

AI is not a feature. It’s not a phase. It’s not a trend you can wait out. It’s increasingly just how software works — the same way “having a website” stopped being optional in 2000 and became the baseline assumption. The companies that held out because some customers preferred paper catalogs are gone.

There’s a meeting happening right now where someone is nodding along to the wrong argument. The users who needed what you didn’t build are already somewhere else. The teams that kept moving are already further ahead than you think.

Ship the thing.