Unfortunately, you need "AI First" to have any chance of VC funding for the past 2 years or so. They are probably keeping this in mind.

The most obvious thing that should be done instead is to make an API spec that AIs can consume for your service, a common spec that if you target, any AI assistant can talk to freely. I feel like we're just over complicating things and burning money. Let the AI people burn their time and energy on the AI, let normal people build useful intuitive tools.

That may be, but you need to not have "AI" or "AI-first" in your description in order to be an interesting product/project.