What happened
Relay, a five-year-old AI workflow automation tool positioned as a Zapier alternative, shut down entirely on Monday after bigger platforms built similar automation into their own products.
Why it matters
Relay is part of a wider pattern — S&P Global Market Intelligence puts the share of AI initiatives ultimately abandoned by their corporate parents at about 42%, for reasons including weak demand and competition.
What to watch
The list is framed as lessons rather than a scorecard, so the test is whether the surviving players learn from these shutdowns; recent casualties include Notion Mail, Huxe, Yupp, and Figgs AI.
WHO IT HITSThe clearest casualties are founders and teams building stand-alone AI tools on top of capabilities that large platforms can absorb into their own products, as Relay, Huxe, Yupp, and Figgs AI each found. Corporate teams running internal AI initiatives also face the roughly 42% abandonment rate reported by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
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Relay's shutdown is the opening example in a running record of AI products, startups, and bets that shut down, pivoted, or significantly missed expectations. The list is explicitly not meant as a scorecard of flops, but as a record of what these attempts can teach the rest of the industry.
The pattern runs from small startups to the largest players. OpenAI's attempt to turn ChatGPT into a broader "super app" on July 9 — combining separate Chat, Codex, and Work modes and renaming the familiar version "ChatGPT Classic" — drew criticism for a confusing, cluttered interface and was rolled back soon after. Its stand-alone ChatGPT Atlas browser lasted less than a year, discontinued on August 9 with its most useful features absorbed into ChatGPT, and Operator and DALL-E saw their roles shrink in the same way. Sora shut down in March 2026. Elsewhere, Apple repeatedly delayed the new Siri it highlighted with Apple Intelligence in 2024, a delay that contributed to a $250 million settlement over how Apple marketed the iPhone 16's AI capabilities; Microsoft's Recall drew a privacy backlash and, after a redesign, a researcher built a tool that could extract data it had captured; Notion Mail is scheduled to shut down on September 22; Humane's AI Pin business shut down in February 2025 with most assets acquired by HP for $116 million; Rabbit's R1 drew weak early reviews but the company kept updating it and announced "Project Cyberdeck"; and Huxe, Yupp, and Figgs AI each shut down for their own reasons, from larger platforms offering similar experiences to a failure to find product-market fit.
The stakes for anyone building or buying AI tools seem to hinge on defensibility rather than novelty. Products whose core function can be folded into a larger platform — as Relay's automation was — appear the most exposed, and the roughly 42% abandonment figure from S&P Global Market Intelligence suggests even in-house corporate AI bets face long odds for reasons including funding, technical challenges, and weak user demand.
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