AI That Does The Work

I harp about ham-fisted and ill-advised use of AI in products all the time, so now I'll switch it up with a shout-out to a good use.

For business banking, AICE Labs uses Venn (at the time of this post). I had to pay a vendor, so I logged in to the platform to discover that they had an AI assistant available right in the product. I tried it out: "Hey, I need to pay $ XYZ to Vendor Corp."

I was expecting some documentation lookup: "To send a payment, click on payments, then select the vendor and enter the amount blablabla."

To my pleasant surprise, it went beyond telling me what to do. Instead, it pulled the payment view into the chat, confirmed with me that it had pre-filled the correct recipient and payment method. I just needed one click to send off the payment. Perfect. I don't want an AI that regurgitates documentation and tells me the steps to take. I want AI that saves me from all those manual clicks and lookups.

Ask yourself: What are your users trying to get done? Can you design an AI that does it for them?