18.1 Designing AI Products

Designing an AI product means starting from a real user problem, not from a model. A good AI product clearly answers: who is the user, what painful task are we improving, and how will we know it worked? The AI is only a means to that end.

For example, a bank in Addis Ababa wants to reduce call-center load. Instead of saying 'let's add a chatbot,' the team first studies the top 20 questions customers actually ask, then designs an assistant that answers those well and hands off the rest to a human.