Judging an AI tool against a real task

Every AI tool looks capable in its own demo, because the demo was chosen to fit it. To know whether a tool is any good for you, give it one of your real tasks, not a clean sample.

Decide what "good" means before you start: accuracy, time saved, how often it fails, and how bad a failure is. Then run the same task through three tools against that rubric. The rankings you get from a fair, pre-committed test rarely match the impression the marketing left.

Write down where each tool broke, not just where it shone. The failure modes are what you will actually have to design around once it is in a process.