A Practical Guide to Integrating AI Into Existing Products

The products that get the most value from AI aren't the ones that bolt on a chatbot — they're the ones that use a model for one specific, well-scoped task inside an existing workflow.

Start with the workflow, not the model

Before choosing an API or a prompt strategy, write down the exact decision a person currently makes by hand. That's the task worth automating first.

Keep a human in the loop where it matters

For anything customer-facing or irreversible, route low-confidence outputs to a person instead of guessing. This is usually a small amount of extra engineering that saves a lot of trust.

What "low confidence" looks like in practice

Often it's as simple as a threshold on a classification score, or asking the model to flag its own uncertainty as part of its output schema.