AI is genuinely useful in software right now, just rarely in the shape people ask for. A short guide to the features that earn their keep.
Nearly every AI request we get starts the same way: "can you add a chatbot?" Sometimes the answer is yes. More often the chatbot is a costly way to avoid fixing the navigation.
The question worth asking first
What repetitive judgement is a human making dozens of times a week? That is where a model earns its keep, because the work is already happening and already costing time.
Features that tend to pay off
- Drafting, not deciding. Generate the first version of a caption, quote or reply. A person still approves it.
- Extraction. Pull structured data out of invoices, forms or emails.
- Classification. Route incoming messages to the right person automatically.
- Search that understands intent rather than matching keywords.
Features that usually disappoint
Open-ended chat over a small, well-organised website. Guests do not want to converse with your homepage. They want the price and the phone number.
A note on cost
Model calls are cheap individually and surprising in aggregate. Any AI feature we ship gets a usage budget and a fallback path for when the key is missing or the quota is spent. A feature that breaks the page when the API is down was not finished.
