AI Tech / news
AI Graveyard Grows as Relay Shuts Down and Character.ai Files for Bankruptcy
A running tally of artificial intelligence ventures that have closed, pivoted or fallen short now includes workflow automation tool Relay and chatbot platform Character.ai. Roughly 42% of corporate AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Relay, a five-year-old workflow automation tool positioned as an alternative to Zapier, ceased operations entirely in August. The product used AI agents to automate email and task workflows, but lost its standalone rationale as OpenAI, Google and other large platforms folded similar automation directly into their own offerings.
More recently, chatbot platform Character.ai filed for bankruptcy, five years after it launched. The two closures sit alongside a wider pattern in which AI bets fail even inside the companies that fund them.
S&P Global Market Intelligence estimates that about 42% of AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned by their corporate parents. The cited causes range from insufficient funding and technical hurdles to competitive pressure, difficulty scaling and weak user demand.
The list of misses also reaches the industry's largest players. Apple's Siri AI has been repeatedly delayed, while OpenAI's attempt to turn ChatGPT into a broader "super app" has been described as a messy launch.
The compilation is framed less as a scorecard of failures than as a record of what the attempts can teach the rest of the industry. Even the biggest names in the sector, it notes, are not immune.