Inside the collapse of Builder.ai: Was it even an AI company?
K arthik started working as a “productologist” for Builder.ai in 2022. In another company, the role — assisting customers in building software — might have been called a product manager. But “productologist” relayed the buzzy way the U.K.-based startup billed itself: as a low-code or no-code artificial intelligence tool that made creating apps and websites as easy as “ordering pizza.” The job title, Karthik told Rest of World, was “confusing in the start.”
By the time he joined, Builder.ai was on its way to becoming one of the world’s hottest startups. It promised to use AI to radically simplify, and automate, the normally time-consuming and technically tedious process of building products. This was via two signature pieces of tech. The first were pre-coded blocks of reusable features — such as user logins, payment platform integrations, or contact pages — in the form of a library that would make software development something like putting together a Lego set. Second was a proprietary AI tool the company advertised as revolutionary, able to drastically reduce human labor and compress “weeks of work into hours and minutes.”
Customers interacted with an AI chatbot named Natasha, which the company said would synthesize client requirements and start the building process for productologists like Karthik, who would get the project customized and on its way to completion. CEO Sachin Dev Duggal, who also had the title of “chief wizard,” claimed the AI could use its library of building blocks to construct at least 80% of an app or web site on its own. “Usually, the majority of the work is done in the first couple of hours” before human engineers take over, he said at a 2018 event.
