read on Forbes

I recently bought a new watch.

It’s made by Withings, a French company that has spent years quietly putting health technology into objects that still look like watches. Mine has a round face and traditional hands. It tracks my heart rate, sleep, activity and a growing collection of other health indicators. Yet most of the time, none of that technology is particularly visible. When I glance at my wrist, I see the time.

That makes it very different from an Apple Watch. Apple has built an extraordinary little computer that happens to live on your wrist. Its rectangular screen is perfectly suited to displaying messages, calendars, maps, apps and notifications. Raise a wrist and the screen wakes up. Tap it and an entire digital world comes alive. Over time, Apple has made that digital world richer, more useful and more sophisticated.

The conventional way to compare these products is to say that Withings makes a watch for people who care about health and Apple makes one for people who want a computer on their wrist. And while that’s certainly true, the real difference between these two watches is a difference in philosophies about how companies create experiences. And in the new era of technology that we’re entering, that difference may matter a whole lot more.


Haunted House Experiences
A Haunted House experience draws us into someone else’s world. Think about walking into a great haunted house at Halloween. The moment we step through the door, we surrender a certain amount of control. Someone else decides where we go, what we see and when something jumps out from behind a curtain. The lighting, sounds, narrow hallways and carefully timed surprises all work together to shape what we notice and how we feel. For a few minutes, the outside world disappears. We stop deciding what happens next and allow someone else to lead us through an experience they’ve created.

Disneyland is a Haunted House experience. So is Facebook. Chuck E. Cheese and the Rainforest Cafe are Haunted House experiences, too. They create distinctive worlds and invite people inside them. That same philosophy also shows up in experiences that seem far less theatrical. Buying a car works this way. So does checking into a hotel, opening a bank account or going to the doctor. In each case, a person enters an environment that someone else has organized, moves through a sequence of steps and encounters choices that have been placed along the way. The experience may last ten minutes or several days. But for that period of time, the company has become the author of the journey.

The people who create Haunted House experiences take their responsibility seriously. They think carefully about what customers should see, what they should think and what they should feel at every stage. They identify the moments that matter, anticipate where people may get confused and orchestrate what should happen next. Much of modern customer experience design grew out of this mindset. CX teams build journey maps that trace a customer from initial awareness through consideration, purchase, use and support. They work hard to create a coherent progression through all of those moments. When that work is done well, the customer barely notices the machinery. The journey simply feels inevitable.

An Apple Watch offers a Haunted House experience in miniature. Apple has carefully designed what happens when we raise our wrist, what appears on the screen and where our attention goes next. A haptic tap lets us know that something has happened. A notification asks to be read. An animation celebrates the closing of an activity ring. Each interaction is tiny, but together they create an entire world that travels with us through the day. Apple has designed that world exceptionally well. Its power comes from its ability to draw our attention toward the experience Apple has created.


Diamond Ring Experiences
A Diamond Ring experience follows a very different philosophy. The company still creates something important, but the larger experience belongs to the customer.


Consider an engagement ring. A jeweler doesn’t design the experience of getting engaged. They don’t decide where the proposal happens, what gets said or whether someone starts crying before the question is even finished. The couple creates that experience. The ring enters the story at a crucial moment and then travels with them into everything that follows. Years later, that object may carry memories of the proposal, the wedding, children, anniversaries, arguments, reconciliations and all the ordinary days in between. Its meaning grows because life keeps happening around it.


And make no mistake, the ring matters. When an excited bride-to-be tells her friends, “We’re getting married!” one of the first questions is likely to be, “Let us see the ring.” If she replies, “Well, we haven’t actually gotten one yet,” there may be a brief moment when everyone wonders how engaged she really is. The ring plays an important role precisely because it gives physical form to something much larger. Plenty of products and services do the same thing. A favorite skillet becomes part of making dinner every night. A camera becomes part of a family vacation. A pair of running shoes becomes part of training for a marathon. These products help shape the experience without making the whole journey about them.


Creating a Diamond Ring experience requires a different mindset. The designer has to begin with an experience that exists beyond the boundaries of the company. What is this person trying to do? What matters to them while they’re doing it? What role could a product or service play in making that experience easier, richer or more meaningful? That demands a certain humility because the company can’t control what happens next. Customers will use the offering in situations the designer never anticipated and attach meanings the company could never manufacture. Great Diamond Ring products earn a place in someone else’s life.

A Withings watch works that way. It does some of the same things as an Apple Watch. It tracks my heart rate, monitors my sleep, counts my steps and keeps an eye on a growing list of health indicators. But most of that technology stays in the background. When I look down at my wrist, I mostly see a nice dive watch. It tells me the time and lets me get back to whatever I was doing. The technology is still playing an important role, but it’s playing that role inside an experience that I’m creating. Withings isn’t trying to draw me into its world. Its designers have created an object that can quietly become part of mine.


Taking Us Hostage
Both experiences have their place. Lots of people love going to Disneyland. There’s something wonderful about stepping into a place that has been imagined down to the smallest detail and allowing it to take over for a while.

We just don’t want to live in Disneyland.

For most of history, Haunted House experiences came with obvious exits. A movie ended and the lights came up. The restaurant brought the check. People willingly surrendered their attention for a period of time because the experience eventually gave it back. The boundaries were part of the bargain.

The business model of the internet changed that bargain. Once human attention could be turned into advertising revenue, companies had a powerful incentive to make the haunted house impossible to leave. The experience gradually lost its ending. The feed could scroll forever. The next video started automatically.

Recommendation engines became steadily better at predicting what would keep someone engaged for another minute, then another ten, then another hour. Every improvement in the product made the exit a little harder to find.

That logic eventually became embedded in the way companies measured success. Daily active users mattered. Session length mattered. Click-through rates mattered. Product teams learned to celebrate engagement because engagement created ad inventory that could be sold. The most successful digital businesses became extraordinarily good at acquiring human attention, holding it and finding ways to bring it back.

That system has shaped the last twenty years of technology. And it has also shaped us. Parents watch their kids disappear into their phones. Even adults install screen-time monitors, delete apps and then reinstall them a few days later. Entire industries have emerged around mindfulness, digital detoxes and helping people reclaim their concentration. We’re all looking for an exit.

For years, we’ve treated this as a problem of self-control. Somehow, individuals are supposed to buy expensive products that are indispensable in modern society but then have enough discipline to resist getting lost in the maze.

But there’s hope. There’s a good chance that AI will disrupt the economics of attention.


A Different Kind of Economics
Consider what happens when someone searches for information online. The traditional search experience sends people on a journey. Type in a question and a page of links appears. Scan them. Pick one. Read it. Come back. Try another. Refine the query. Search again. That experience can be extremely useful, and every additional step creates another opportunity for someone to capture your attention.

Ask an AI the same question and the journey collapses. The system can absorb the information, synthesize it and return an answer. When someone asks an AI to compare two contracts, summarize a hundred-page report or explain an unfamiliar concept before a meeting, there’s little value in keeping that person around longer. The product becomes more useful when it resolves the need and gets out of the way.

Agents could push that logic even further. Imagine software that books a flight, reschedules a meeting, orders groceries, researches an insurance claim or fights with the cable company. In each case, the best experience may involve almost no experience at all. The customer cares about the outcome. Every extra minute spent managing the technology is friction.

There’s another difference in the economics of AI: a large language model costs money every time it thinks. Leading AI APIs are priced by the tokens they process, so longer interactions consume more compute and often cost more to serve. That can create almost the opposite incentive from an advertising business, where another minute of attention can create another opportunity to make money. For many AI products, getting to the answer faster, using fewer tokens and accomplishing the task with less interaction can actually improve the economics. Those incentives don’t guarantee that companies will give us our attention back, but for the first time in decades, they can reward technology for knowing when it’s done.

That’s a profound reversal in the economics of digital design. For twenty years, many of the world’s most valuable digital products became more valuable by consuming more of our attention. AI can create value by consuming less of it. Companies can compete on how much complexity they absorb, how much time they save and how quickly they help people return to whatever they were doing before the technology intervened. In that world, time spent with the product can become evidence of failure.


Voice assistants offer an early glimpse of this idea. When I ask Alexa how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon while I’m cooking dinner, the experience remains about me cooking dinner for my family. There’s no need to stop, open a screen, scan a page and disappear into another environment. The technology enters my experience, contributes something useful and goes away. AI can bring that philosophy to almost every category of digital product.


After twenty years in which the economics of technology overwhelmingly favored capturing our attention, AI is creating a powerful economic incentive to give some of it back.


Giving Attention Back
Of course, none of this guarantees that the attention economy will disappear. That same technology could create Haunted House experiences that are even more powerful than anything that came before. AI can generate endless entertainment tailored to individual tastes, companions that always know what to say and digital environments that continuously adapt to hold someone’s interest. Give an AI the job of maximizing engagement and it will probably become terrifyingly good at it.


Still, we have a different model available to us for the first time in decades. Companies can build products that behave more like Diamond Rings. They can understand the larger experience someone is trying to have, contribute something valuable to it and then fade into the background. They can design technology that lives in our world instead of continually asking us to enter theirs.

That possibility should change how leaders think about experience design. For years, companies have invested enormous energy in designing seamless journeys that keep people moving from one interaction to the next. The goal has been to make experiences that are richer, deeper and more engaging. AI creates room for a different ambition: make the interaction smaller. Remove steps. Absorb complexity. Give people what they need and return their attention to the rest of their lives. That’s a much bigger shift than a new user interface. It changes the role that technology plays in human experience.


That brings us back to my new watch. A Withings watch can look less ambitious than an Apple Watch. It has fewer things to tap, fewer worlds to enter and fewer reasons to stare at it. Yet that restraint contains a different vision of what good technology can be. The watch plays an important role in my health and then allows the larger experience of life to continue.


We’ve heard a lot about how AI will change work. We’ve heard how it will disrupt industries, rewrite business models and reorder the competitive landscape. Its effect on the attention economy may prove just as consequential. For the first time in a generation, some of the most valuable technology may succeed by demanding less of us. The attention economy taught companies to build technology we couldn’t put down. AI could reward the ones that know when to leave us alone.