AI features that are actually worth building

Every product brief we receive now mentions AI. Some of those features are genuinely transformative. Others are expensive decoration.

Worth building:

- Triage and drafting. AI that reads incoming enquiries, categorises them and drafts a response for human review saves real hours every day.
- Search that understands meaning. Letting users search "flats near good schools under £1,200" beats forcing them through six filter dropdowns.
- Document extraction. Pulling structured data out of invoices, certificates and forms removes some of the most tedious admin that exists.

Usually not worth building (yet):

- Chatbots bolted onto a product that lacks the underlying data to answer questions well.
- AI-generated content pipelines with no human review — quality collapses and trust goes with it.
- Predictions without enough historical data to predict from.

Our rule: AI earns its place when it removes repetitive work or makes something findable that was not. If a feature cannot pass that test, the budget is better spent on the core product.