Adding AI to an existing app

Most requests for AI in a business sound like "we would like some AI in there". That is not a brief, it is a feeling that something ought to be happening. And the result tends to be a chatbot that cannot answer anything important and that nobody opens after a week.

A useful AI feature is recognised by being nameable in one sentence and by having behind it work someone does by hand today.

What a good AI feature looks like

In Paving Planner it is turning a photo of a hand sketch into a technical drawing. It did not come from an idea to add AI, but from the fact that redrawing the area was the bottleneck and people did not want to get into it.

The same principle applies to reading data from documents. A specific piece of work is removed, not an effect added.

What I will tell you straight

To most companies that ask me about AI, I answer that their problem is not in AI. It tends to be that the data is in five places, or that nobody ever named the process. AI does not make that better, only faster.

AI speeds up my own work too, but it does not decide what gets built, and it does not replace the conversation at the start.