Used where it genuinely beats ordinary software, and not used where it does not.
Book a consultationThe current wave has made it easy to sell almost anything by attaching the word AI to it. Plenty of what gets pitched is a rules engine, a scheduled job, or a database query, all of which are cheaper, faster and far more predictable than a language model.
The reverse mistake is just as expensive: reaching for AI on a problem where the data is not good enough to support it, then discovering after the build that the output cannot be trusted for anything that matters.
Which of your problems are genuinely suited to AI, which are ordinary automation wearing the label, and which are neither. The second group is usually the largest and the cheapest to fix.
Documents, emails and free text are where language models actually earn their cost: extracting fields from invoices or contracts, classifying and routing incoming messages, summarising long threads.
A question-answering assistant is only worth having if what it learns goes somewhere. Conversations should land in your CRM as records, not evaporate inside a chat widget.
Confidence thresholds, escalation to a person on anything uncertain, and a log of what the system decided and why. Anything touching money or a customer commitment keeps a human decision point.
Separate genuine AI problems from ordinary automation and from things not worth doing at all.
If the input is inconsistent or incomplete, that gets fixed first. A model cannot repair bad data.
One process, in production, measured against how it was done before.
Log what it decided, review the errors, and expand only once the first one has earned it.
The assistant on this website answers visitor questions from a knowledge file we control, and logs every conversation to our dashboard as a record. It is a deliberately small example of the pattern, running in production on our own site.
Automated testing that tells you something true, on the paths where being wrong is expensive.
Web applications built to work on a mid-range phone on a bad connection, because that is how most South Africans will use them.
Deployments that are small, cheap and unremarkable to run, because infrastructure should be the least interesting part of your system.
A short call costs nothing and usually makes the answer obvious. If a different piece of work suits you better, we will say so.