Can't We Just Use AI For This?
by Jordan North, Founder and Engineering Lead
The most dangerous phrase in business right now. Every meeting, someone says it. And technically, yes, you can. You can also technically cut your own hair.
The Demo vs The Reality
The gap between what AI looks like in a demo and what it does when you actually need it.
ChatGPT can write a marketing email in 3 seconds - impressive until you realise it knows nothing about your customers, your tone, your product, or why someone should care. The demo is the trick. The implementation is the work.
Context Is The Product
The AI is commodity. GPT-4, Claude, Gemini - they're all impressive and they're all available to everyone. What isn't available to everyone is your customer data, your pricing logic, your edge cases, your "except when..." rules. The value isn't access to AI. It's teaching it everything that makes your business yours.
Guardrails Over Capabilities
Raw AI will confidently do the wrong thing. It'll quote prices you don't offer, promise timelines you can't hit, hallucinate products that don't exist. The actual work is building the walls - what it can and can't say, when it escalates to a human, how it handles the weird edge cases. An AI without guardrails isn't an employee, it's a liability.
So yes, you can "just use AI."
And your competitors who actually implement it properly will thank you for it.