AI vs Traditional Automation: When to Use Which

Traditional automation, like scheduled scripts or rule-based workflows, is cheaper, more predictable, and easier to debug than AI for any task with clear, fixed rules.

AI becomes worthwhile when a task involves interpreting unstructured input, handling significant variation, or making judgment calls that would require an impractical number of rules to encode manually.

We default to the simpler tool whenever it genuinely solves the problem, since an AI solution to a rule-based problem is usually more expensive and less reliable than it needs to be.