It looks shiny, it looks attractive, it looks like a Swiss Army knife in the mind of product managers and founders to see “Ask AI” in a button with a “sparkles” icon.
It’s so popular that you can’t even call your business or product “modern” without having this “AI integration” in the mix.
But the truth is, this is far from being a real “killer” feature to have in your business, because having an input bar with a “Ask AI” button for content search is now very likely one of the AI standards, it’s a demo to show the value of the model and how it’s been applied in a specific business context — it’s like how most ai companies preaching AGI [1] almost start by showing an AI-powered travel planning tool. It shouldn’t be that exciting anymore; there is more needed for AI to be impactful.
Short note on “Ask AI”
“Ask AI” is a conversational interface layered on top of existing data, tools, or workflows, allowing users to query systems in natural language instead of navigating menus, filters, or dashboards — it’s just a new way of doing search in applications using AI.
It’s now seen by many product companies as a non-negotiable feature for users. They do not train an AI model for that, it’s usually accomplished (as a feature) by implementing a “Prompting + retrieval + orchestration” system on top of an existing application.
This aligns with how companies like Notion (“Ask Notion AI”), Intercom (“AI Copilot”), and GitHub Copilot Chat have implemented it.
Most implementations are:
User question
→ Retrieval (docs / DB / APIs) → Prompt assembly → LLM response → UI rendering
User Experience (UX) tends to be universal
When you go back in time, it looked a little bit stupid to have a phone without a built-in keyboard; the idea of having a phone that works using touchscreen technology wasn’t common and widely spread. Why? Because people were not used to it.
This happens a lot when it comes to software products. Users are typically impatient, and they don’t like anything that comes with a bad experience because they don’t have time for that; they like pragmatic User Interface (UI) solutions that just work and get their job done, that’s it. They all speak the same language with different words and ways of expressing themselves and this is universal.
A red button usually means a dangerous button for something like delete, remove, or archive. Using a blue button for this feature is one of the worst decisions to make in product development.
A “home” icon is meant to lead users to the home page and not the settings page. They will literally hate your product if it doesn’t follow that pattern.
So, this makes them predictable.
The ChatGPT way, the AI UX standard
Now we have tools like ChatGPT used by more than 700M+ weekly users around the world [2], which in and of itself means “validation”, the product grows because people like it and can’t stop talking about it. In other words, it is the standard of AI-powered research and navigation for users.
The more users use ChatGPT, the more chatbot-friendly it will get, and expect every other software to adapt.
That’s one of the reasons behind integrating “AI mode” in Google’s search engine (they get it right!), they know users just want to chat today, they don’t need to run after SEO keywords and technical shortcuts anymore: they just … ask it!
“Ask AI” is not a competitive advantage anymore
Given the popularity of these chatbots, the question-answer UX pattern being so effective and widely proven to be a successful model, thinking of your “Ask AI” button as a strong differentiator is a bit off, for many technical reasons, and here are 3 of them:
It’s not rocket science for AI developers to integrate that anymore
Your competitors can replicate it in a couple of weeks
You’re overrating the feature when it’s just a “search feature” built for your product — why are they (users) searching for it if you don’t have real features that actually meet their primary needs?
An “Ask AI” is not enough, unless it’s connected with actionable functions that solve real users' pain points for them to continue coming back to your product.
Notes
[1] "Between AGI and ASI", from AI, by Kenn Kibadi
[2] OpenAI, https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/
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