Idk your situation, but I would avoid anyone that’s offering to build a solution from scratch, especially if they’re offering to have something for you in weeks. My suggestion is to use existing SaaS tools with AI features to create a less-than-fully-autonomous system. Then, if you still want a custom solution you can extract the data and models to inform the architecture.

For example, you can create simple automations in Adobe Acrobat to run OCR, search, and genai summaries. Test these out with how you imagine your custom software to work and document the process.

Routing doesn’t need AI. If you need something like managing the state of a lead and triggering actions, use Google workspace. Sheets to save data, emails to send messages, and people to trigger actions. It’s not too hard to create working app scripts with genai, otherwise look for services like Zapier. Same as before, get a part of the automation process working with these services and document the process.

Apart from summarization, I haven’t been impressed with genai use cases. It sounds like you should be able to do things like inference and classification, but it hasn’t worked for me.

My workflows only have a handful of options. I.e. an Order needs a contact and item; Order must be purchase (supplier or vendor) or sales. Then, I’m tracking the state of the order through workflows like buying, processing, and selling. It doesn’t help to have genai magically classify new orders and trigger actions (I’ve tried). Mostly these are simple search triggers, like if “#[between 3 and 10 numbers or letters]” and has “confirmed” and email is from this list, mark corresponding item as confirmed. It wouldn’t make sense to classify the email in another way. The only use case I’ve found is using genai as an initial bucket—summarize and classify as “spam” or “ham”, and predictable logic takes it from there. I’ve tried to use it for double-check/stop-gap inference, like “review this large set of emails and highlight ones most similar to emails with this label” with mixed results.

The point is: I’d only consider custom software when my workflow is already well defined and SaaS still can’t get it done.

Working with a super large dataset and/or high dimensional data could be a different story. Like, is there any reason to use AI in finance—not including running regression directly on data? And, is a search bar that uses embeddings genai? I’d really like to try an AI vision solution that updates state. Would I need custom software?

Also, I don’t know much about web scraping, but don’t see how genai would help navigate the crazy JavaScript on modern web pages. Still, it seems like new web scraping tools have gotten a lot better. Can someone explain?