The fastest way to waste an AI budget is to bolt a chatbot onto a product that did not need one. The best AI features are invisible: they remove a step, draft a first version, or surface the right information at the right moment.
Start from the workflow, not the model. Where do people spend time on repetitive judgement calls? Classification, extraction, summarisation, and drafting are the workhorses that quietly save hours every week.
Measure the feature like any other: does it reduce time-to-task, error rate, or support load? If you cannot point to the number it moves, it is decoration.
