What’s the best use of AI you’ve seen so far?
Many of us use it for text generation, image generation, and making tasks fast.
That is something repetitive, and over one week or so, it is not so mindblowing anymore.
I started thinking about this question after my friend said: I use AI to recreate tools I would normally have had to pay a license fee or subscription for.
So the thing is, it is easy to replicate things.
But do you have any examples of something created by AI that was really useful and innovative?
We could start with one noble thing, like using AI to find a cure for cancer – a specific article here.
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I've had a few instances that have been helpful.
Running analysis across different analytics gathered to identify patterns and make recommendations. Very helpful for SEO and identifying highest impact days to post.
A replacement for "googling" when researching technical problems. Really cuts the noise and gets to the answer faster. A lot of documentation might be really poorly written (looking at you Auth0) or google results return SEO-optimized articles that are product pitches or totally irrelevant.
These aren't super innovative but fall in the category of minimal effort for huge returns. But honestly I think that's where the greatest value comes in. I don't need AI to do some niche thing that's cool but rarely needed, I need it to make my biggest pains a whole lot easier.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@edward_g In the individual use it is pretty helpful. But if we wanted to point out like general usefulness for the humankind – what would it be? :)
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@busmark_w_nika Ah! In that case I would say enabling more people to bring their ideas to life. From what I've seen it's most effective at helping people turn concepts into something tangible. That's been a barrier for a lot of people for a very long time.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@tereza_hurtova Yeah, actually AI is not such innovative when you see every second launch "AI agent, AI agent, AI agent" :D But that information about helping with low-vision is pretty useful! :)
The most useful AI I've seen is the boring kind — applied inside specific structured analytical workflows where it eats hours of mechanical work that humans don't do well anyway.
In financial modeling: ingesting a 200-page offering memorandum and pulling out the deal terms (capacity, COD, debt sculpt schedule, covenants, DSCR triggers) into a structured table that drops straight into model inputs. That used to be a full afternoon of an analyst's life. Now it's ten minutes of supervised extraction plus twenty minutes of human verification.
Similar wins on translating foreign-language financial statements, drafting model documentation and audit notes, and packaging sensitivity outputs into clean tornado charts.
The pattern: structured input, structured output, and a human who can spot when the model has confidently invented a number that isn't in the source. Not as flashy as 'AI cured X,' but it adds up to about twenty percent of someone's week back — which is the productivity gain that actually shows up in deliverables.
Where it still falls down: the judgment calls. DSCR target for a merchant wind project versus a contracted solar one. Why a specific lender wants 18 months DSRA on this deal but six on that one. Those require live deal context that doesn't exist in training data.
Honestly, the best use of AI I’ve seen so far is helping small creators and solo business owners do work that normally needs a whole team.
A few years ago, writing blogs, making thumbnails, researching SEO, replying on social media, editing videos — all of that took forever. Now AI helps speed up the boring parts so people can focus more on ideas and execution.
I don’t think AI replaces creativity. It just removes a lot of friction. The people using it best are the ones treating it like an assistant, not a replacement.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@kamrankhan Yes, but those are activities I enjoyed – to be creative. I would rather welcome the system that helps me with cleaning and laundry :D
The most impressive one I've seen wasn't a flashy consumer app. It was an AI agent at a regional bank that cut KYC processing from 5 days to under 24 hours. What made it work wasn't the model itself, it was how the system routed different document types to different models based on complexity.
That's when it clicked for me: the orchestration matters way more than which LLM you pick.
The best use of AI for me is helping my creative brain translate ideas into something real 😄
Not as a magic button, but as a bridge between the way I imagine things and the way they can actually be built
I can't attach the video here, but in this post I showed how I use Claude for both my digital and physical side quests 🙌
Honestly the most underrated use I've seen isn't flashy at all. We had a client in logistics spending 3-4 hours a day manually triaging support queries, most of them the exact same "where's my order" questions. Set up an AI agent to handle it, two weeks later that person is doing actual account management work. Nobody's writing a Medium post about it, but the ROI was immediate and obvious.
That's kind of where I land on this question. The "AI curing cancer" stuff is real and matters, but the thing that actually changes how companies operate day to day is just... making the boring stuff not exist anymore. What are the unglamorous use cases people here are most proud of?