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AI28 March 20265 min

AI features that solve problems vs AI features that demo well

Most AI features in business software exist because someone decided the product needed AI. A chatbot here, a summary there, maybe some auto-generated content. They demo well. They rarely survive contact with actual daily use.

The AI features we build start from the opposite direction: what repetitive, high-volume task is consuming human attention that could be better spent elsewhere?

For a healthcare practice, it meant taking the paperwork out of the clinician's day — the model reads the free-form notes and hands back the structured record, so the practitioner spends the hour with the client, not the keyboard. For a legal platform, it meant document intelligence — reading long agreements to surface the clauses and obligations that matter to the user's specific situation.

Both features are invisible. There's no chatbot, no 'Ask AI' button. The intelligence is woven into the workflow so naturally that users forget it's there. That's the goal.

We use Claude for most of our AI work — Sonnet for high-volume processing where cost and speed matter, Opus for complex reasoning where accuracy is critical. The model selection is part of the engineering, not a marketing decision.

If your AI feature needs a tutorial to explain why it's useful, it's solving the wrong problem.

Jacob WelshAll posts →