How well today's AI tools actually perform in a specific job: what works, what fails, one score out of 5.
AI cuts first-draft time on reference docs and how-to guides by roughly half, but it still invents parameters, flags, and API fields that do not exist in your codebase.
AI drafts and triages tickets fast enough to cut first response time in half, but it still mishandles or wrongly closes at least 1 in 10 refund and account access requests without flagging the miss.
AI now does the writing half of product management well (PRDs, summaries, updates) and still cannot do the deciding half (prioritization, tradeoffs, saying no); a PM who treats it as a drafting engine gains a day a week, and one who treats it as a decision engine ships worse roadmaps faster.
AI now writes the code half of data engineering well (SQL, dbt models, pipeline boilerplate) and stays dangerous on the data half: a wrong transformation runs clean and returns plausible numbers, so every AI-written query needs a validation step the tools do not provide.
AI cuts demo-prep and RFP-response time by roughly half, but it still invents technical specs, so a sales engineer must verify every claim before a prospect sees it.
AI tools cut UX research synthesis time roughly in half, but they still misattribute a quote to the wrong participant in more than 1 of every 5 sessions checked.
AI cuts first-pass policy review time for compliance officers by roughly half, but in testing it missed 2 of 5 planted conflicting-clause errors across ChatGPT Enterprise, Claude, and Harvey, so nothing ships without a human sign-off.
AI cuts recruiter sourcing and screening time by roughly half, but every HireVue score and every AI-drafted outreach message still needs a human read before it reaches a candidate.
AI tools cut the drafting time on comps memos and market summaries by half, but none of them will catch a broken formula reference in your own model, so you still check every number by hand.
AI does first-pass document review and summarization well enough to save a paralegal several hours a week, and remains unfit for anything citable: fabricated authorities are still routine in 2026, so every case, statute, and clause reference must be verified in Westlaw or Lexis before it leaves your desk.
