Every product's landing page says "AI-powered." Most of them are just a ChatGPT API call: ask the user something, show the response, then slap an "AI-powered" label on top. There's a simple test for this. Take the AI out. If the product works the same way without it, the AI was a buzzword. Take it out of ours and things fall apart: ShortsByAuto turns into a manual video editor, Hatıra Notalar stops working entirely, and Şarj Asistanı is left as a static map.
In ShortsByAuto, the AI watches long videos and pulls out the moments most likely to hold attention. That means video analysis, speech recognition, and visual selection, with several models handing work to each other. In Hatıra Notalar, someone tells a story and the AI turns it into an actual song, melody and lyrics and arrangement included. There the AI isn't a feature bolted onto the product. It is the product. In Şarj Asistanı, it reads your route and works out where to stop and charge, weighing traffic, remaining range, station availability, and charging speed as they change.
Connecting to an API is the easy part. Making the output usable is where the months go. Our early ShortsByAuto builds cut subtitles off mid-sentence. Hatıra Notalar's first songs were technically correct and completely lifeless. The old "great in the demo, falls apart in production" problem is real, and we walked right into it. Getting AI to actually work for a real person is much harder than wiring it up.
So here's what we took away from it. AI on its own isn't a product. Strip away the experience around it, the data pipeline feeding it, and the error handling catching its mistakes, and you're left with something nobody can use. Users never ask what model you're running. They ask whether the thing did what they wanted. Match the right problem to the right tool and you're mostly there.