Stop Slapping a Chat Interface on Everything

Please stop trying to slap a chat interface on everything. Save that for problems that suit it.

It’s common knowledge that VCs are excited about the coming wave of AI-powered vertical SaaS.

But what makes one AI VSaaS product stand out from another? My gut feeling is subtlety - in a good AI VSaaS product the “AI” should be kind of in the background. Rushing to put a single godlike chat interface in front of everything is a mistake - I don’t see, generally, conclusive evidence that this is a better UX than a clickable interface for many problems.

I would instead be looking for marginal gains in the product. Where can we deploy AI in a highly specialised task to make a customer journey take 50% fewer clicks? Or can we use it to make intelligent suggestions for the customer to confirm, rather than just asking the customer for information? Can we automate that which we used to leave to customer configuration?

Remember that the goal of using this technology is ultimately to save time. Contextualise your AI interface decisions against that goal.