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When should a startup add AI to its product?

A simple test for telling the AI features worth building apart from the ones that only look good in a demo.

Founders ask us this every week. Our answer is always the same: add AI when it removes a step your users already find slow, not when it adds a new one they never asked for.

Three questions we ask first

  • Is there a repetitive task users do by hand today?
  • Do you have the data to do it well, or can you get it?
  • What happens when the model is wrong — and can the user recover?

If the answer to the last question is "nothing good", we look for a narrower version of the feature, or put a human review step in front of it.

Start with a prototype against real data

A week spent prototyping against your own data tells you more than a month of planning. It shows where the model shines, where it fails, and what it will cost to run at scale.

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