“Enshitification” is the slow rot of digital products—more friction, more extraction, less value. Author Cory Doctorow popularized it as a repeatable pattern: platforms delight users — then tilt toward business customers — then squeeze both for short-term profit.
The term has gone mainstream (Word of the Year selections in the U.S. and Australia), which tells you how widely this pain is felt.
Once-great digital products slowly rot. They get cluttered with ads, fees, dark patterns, and nags—until the customer experience (CX) feels… bad. It applies to B2C and B2B.
1) Win users. Make it easy, cheap, delightful.
2) Tilt the table. Once users are locked in, favor advertisers/marketplaces/upsells over user value.
3) Squeeze both sides. With high switching costs and weak competition, extraction outruns experience—until trust and growth stall.
• Network effects and switching costs trap customers.
• DRM/walled gardens block interoperability and data portability (the “right of exit”).
• Market concentration rewards short-term extraction over long-term outcomes.
• NRR drag: expansions slow because value isn”t obvious to buyers.
• Rising cost-to-serve: more meetings and decks; fewer decisions.
• TTV slips: onboarding is self-serve theater, not guided progress.
• Renewal risk: economic buyers don”t see outcomes in their own numbers—so consensus never forms.
Executives:
When customer value becomes a cost center, you get short spikes in revenue and long winters of churn and brand drag. (Doctorow's proposed systemic fixes—interoperability, portability, antitrust—aim to rebalance incentives.)
You don”t need to trade margin for experience. The way out is to make customer outcomes visible, personal, and frequent—and let that drive profit.
Where Cast.app fits: customer-facing AI Agents that assemble, narrate, and present each account”s usage, ROI, risks, benchmarks, and next actions—with live Q&A—to every stakeholder (economic buyers, champions, admins) without adding headcount. That”s how you scale coverage and depth together (think 2x breadth, 10x depth, 0+ headcount).
1) Make value obvious—per account, per role. Agents turn product exhaust into an executive-grade story: outcomes achieved, what”s at risk, and what to do next—grounded in the customer”s own data. Visibility trust NRR.
2) Replace friction with personalized guided moments. Onboarding tasks, adoption nudges, renewal work-backs, expansion “what-ifs”—delivered as short, role-aware storyboards that use each account”s data and numbers. Stakeholders can ask questions live; the agent answers from source systems. Goodbye maze of tabs; hello progress.
3) Scale breadth and depth (without extra people). Cover every contact at every account with meaningful, data-backed touchpoints, not generic blasts—the opposite of the thin support that fuels enshitification.
4) Be transparent and auditable. Every recommendation cites the “why”: segment benchmarks, month-over-month trends, utilization thresholds. Customers and internal leaders trust what they can verify.
5) Keep humans for high-leverage moments. Agents do prep, analysis, and presentations. Humans handle judgment, relationships, and edge cases. Cost-to-serve falls while perceived quality rises—profit because CX improved, not despite it.
What if something so approachable, e.g., a Business Review were digital—available to every contact and decision-maker at every account—and became a secret weapon for growing and scaling revenue, without scaling teams or enshitifying CX?
With Cast.app, each account gets an always-on, personalized QBR drawn from that account”s own data and numbers: outcomes achieved, gaps, renewal readiness, and next best actions—presented proactively and ready for live Q A.
• Role-aware views: exec summaries for buyers; deeper drill-downs for admins/champions.
• Source-of-truth links: SFDC, product analytics, data warehouse—auditable and consistent.
• No “big-reveal”tax: continuous updates replace quarterly scrambles, sustaining momentum and consensus.
• Renewals: earlier risk flags + clear work-back plans higher on-time renewals, fewer concessions.
• Expansion: quantified “why now” tied to outcomes faster yeses and cleaner multi-threading.
• Onboarding: shorter TTV via stepwise, role-aware guidance fewer escalations.
• Leadership clarity: scheduled executive reviews easier management of NRR, coverage, and CSM time allocation.
What is enshitification? A predictable slide where platforms extract more and deliver less. (See: Wired (Doctorow), Financial Times review.)
How do we solve enshitification? Align profit with customer outcomes, prove it in each account”s numbers, and deliver guidance people actually follow—at scale. Amanpour & Company interview and The Verge Decoder discuss practical fixes like interoperability, portability, and antitrust.
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