Question 2
Q002 · by Alexey Makarov — AI Strategist, Practitioner & Educator · Founder, AI Center of Excellence
Watch on YouTube →Before choosing an AI product, ask why it needs AI at all, and where AI adds value that conventional software doesn't.
Before choosing an AI product, ask why it needs AI at all. Conventional software may already do the job.
Your team or vendor should be able to explain where AI adds value, and why that value justifies the token costs and uncertain outputs.
Today, everyone is building an AI startup or an AI product. And the use cases which are presented during your corporate life mostly involve some kind of AI element. If you are a business leader, or in general if you are participating in a meeting about AI, one of the questions which is very important to ask is, first of all, why do we need AI here? Sometimes, and actually in most cases, maybe you don't even need AI in this kind of product. Maybe deterministic software, you can think of it as the old, previous software where you program everything without AI, can do the whole work.
And you do not need an LLM, you do not need to pay for the tokens, and you do not need to introduce the probabilistic output of large language models and bear the consequences. So the question is, why do you need AI in this product? And if the team or the person who is presenting the idea can explain to you which advantages AI is giving in this particular startup or in this particular use case, in which element of the process AI is actually required, then you might think that the person knows their business.
If not, then potentially they need to prepare slightly better.
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