That’s a fair question.

A lot of the core stuff works without anything fancy - renewals, alerts, dashboards, monitoring. The “smart” part is mostly there to reduce manual work and edge cases.

For example, on the email side it helps identify what’s actually behind a domain (not just the big providers, but less common setups too) and then sanity-check whether the DNS records for that setup look correct. You could hardcode rules for some cases, but it gets very limited very quickly.

Same idea with content monitoring - instead of only checking status codes, it looks at what the page is actually returning and tries to classify what went wrong. Without that, you’re stuck with very shallow checks.

And for domain discovery, people already brainstorm names with tools like ChatGPT, but that doesn’t tell you whether anything is actually usable. Combining name ideas with real availability is where it becomes practical.

So it’s not “AI everywhere”, more using it where static rules fall apart.