When is AI the wrong tool?

AI is the wrong tool when being slightly wrong costs money, a license, a body, or a customer you cannot get back. Draft, tag, extract, summarise — with a human on the send — can be right. Unsupervised refunds, diagnosis, legal answers, and invented Saturday hours are not a feature. They are an incident with a chat log.

Buyers ask this before they ask which model. The honest answer is a list of nos, not a capability matrix.

Wrong on purpose

Refunds and price promises. Bookings the calendar does not have. Medical or legal advice. Silent emails to a list. Anything you cannot undo by Friday. If a vendor’s demo does those without a named person, walk away.

Wrong because the job is not stuck that way

If the site cannot take a booking and the FAQ is empty, a chatbot is a slower phone. If the sheet is the company, a model on top of the sheet is a faster mess. Fix the stuck job first. Then, if the hours are still real, put a clerk on that job with a kill switch.

Wrong because you will not own it

A consumer chatbot holding customer files. A key in the browser. No processor in the privacy policy. No switch to turn it off. That is not innovation. That is a subscription you cannot fire.

How I judge whether the idea is real

I ask three questions on the first call. What job did a person do last week that you want a machine to draft? Who checks the output before a customer sees it? What happens on Friday if we turn the feature off? If you cannot answer those, we are not ready to write a statement of work. We are ready to write the FAQ or the SOP first — and that is often the actual project.

I would rather decline a fashionable chatbot than ship something that lies about hours, stock, refunds or a diagnosis. The invoice has my company’s name on it. That is why the no’s are part of the work.

What you should have in writing before you pay anyone

The job in one sentence. The data the model may see. The human who confirms. The metric you will look at in 30 days. The kill switch. The legal name of the vendor. USD price and when the card is charged. Who owns the repo. If a vendor cannot put those on one page, you are buying a demo.

• Nothing is billed by us before you approve a written scope.
• Typical project billing is 50% to start and 50% on delivery, through Stripe.
• Code, design and prompts we write for you transfer on final payment.

This week

1. 01

   Write what you cannot undo by Friday

   Money, sends, medicine, law. Those stay human. If the vendor’s demo does them unsupervised, it is the wrong tool.

2. 02

   Name the stuck job without a model

   If the FAQ, booking, or sheet is still the leak, fix that first.

3. 03

   Only then pick a clerk job

   Draft, tag, extract. A person confirms. A kill switch exists.

Questions

When is AI the wrong tool?

When being slightly wrong costs money, a license, a body, or a customer you cannot get back. Unsupervised refunds, diagnosis, legal answers, and invented hours are incidents. Draft, tag, extract — with a human on the send — can be right.