Almost all SaaS products start to offer a chatbot in them, from banking, to accounting, to insurance. And at a lot of companies, their first AI products or initiatives are chatbot products. But is chat the best entry point to AI internally or externally?

Chat certainly seems the most straightforward way for users to interact with AI. After all, it all started with ChatGPT. But does it make our products look like a thin wrapper around ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini? Or are we just creating a similar version of these? For some of the products I've worked on, I wonder from time to time that why users would come to these products instead of just using ChatGPT. What are the features users can only get from the products I worked on?

The first AI feature I built was using AI to summarize evidence and generate legal documents. The feature started with no chat interface, although it evolved over time and eventually did have one in it. But the chat seems more natural and integrated with the rest of the product by then. On the other hand, some of the products I use regularly, they start to add chatbots. They seem to come out of nowhere though, and have no connection to the rest of the products. It makes me feel like these products are just adding AI for sake of adding AI.

So to me, an AI product / feature needs to provide more than what users can do with ChatGPT alone (although the idea can come from there), and an AI feature should have a clear purpose to users, not just the kind of "ask me anything".