The AI in your product doesn't have to be a chat box

A lot of products these days are putting AI in their product as a chat box. Or an AI assistant. Those are useful and demo well, and they’re the obvious ways to use AI, but there are more subtle, smaller ways that are highly valuable too.

The key moments in a product are often the initial onboarding, and any friction there. This is why products have walkthroughs, tooltip tours, and setup videos nobody watches. All of that exists because the step underneath it is hard. Other moments might be going through to tag something or map fields. Asking users to do this before was the only way. Soon, it will be barbaric.

An example would be Linear. Their AI filters let you describe what you want to see in a few words instead of building the filter yourself, and Triage Intelligence suggests the team, project, assignee, and labels on an incoming issue, with the option to apply them automatically. Those are small delights. The same shape shows up in a logistics product I built. Onboarding a merchant who ships through third-party warehouses used to take an hour, with back and forth over email, and it required deep understanding of the configuration. Now AI just does it, in 30 seconds, better than I did it. That’s the whole hour gone, and the onboarding scaffolding goes with it.

Products would do well to consider these more subtle, less flashy ways to use AI in their product. Previously some of these could be done with cheaper or lightweight models like Haiku. Now it’s even more possible with the advent of Jev this week. It’s fast and cheap enough that you can run judgment on everything, not just the moments expensive enough to justify it. In the first week people have pointed it at everything: triaging an inbox, categorizing bank transactions, routing support tickets, picking the next action in a coding harness, even linting prose a paragraph at a time. People are already publishing worked examples of the ones that fit inside a product.

As an example, in the spring I built a tool that for fun “unspun” headlines. You’d visit a site and it would unspin them. I used Haiku and it was pretty fast, but I had to use caching to keep costs down. Now, with something like Jev, I wouldn’t bother writing the caching.

This goes back to the old Steve Krug idea, “Don’t Make Me Think”. Look for opportunities to use AI in your product and truly help a user not think. Before it was only via pixels and good UI design. Now we can inject actual AI judgment into the mix and create truly magical and delightful user experiences. Chat has its place, but so does a traditional UI with AI sprinkled throughout.