By Michael Ajala
It is a Friday night in Lagos. Your transfer has failed for the third time. Somewhere in a server farm in Ikeja, the bank’s API has gone quiet. And the only thing your fintech app has to say about it is: “Something went wrong. Please try again later.”
I want you to sit with that sentence for a moment. Read it the way the user reads it at 11 pm with rent due on Monday. Read it the way the user reads it while standing outside a pharmacy, trying to pay. Read it the way your mother would read it, the one who finally agreed to try the app after months of you swearing it was easy.
The sentence is grammatically correct. It is also, for lack of a better word, completely useless. It tells the user nothing about what actually happened, nothing about whether their money is safe, nothing about whose fault this is or what they should do next. Worst of all, it doesn’t sound like anyone wrote it. Because they are just automatic messages now.
That’s what I want to talk about. Over the last two years, while every product team I know was scrambling to plug AI into their stack, something quieter was happening in the background. The apps got smarter. They also stopped sounding like anyone you’d actually want to talk to.
