In 2026, "AI-powered" is not a differentiator. Your customers have a personalised onboarding, a natural-language search box, and a support agent that can book an exchange before you finish typing your question. Matching that floor is now the cost of doing business.
What's different from 2023
The first wave of LLM features was demos. The second wave is production: guarded releases, eval harnesses, cost ceilings, and hand-offs to human agents that don't feel like a brick wall. The tools to do this well have matured, which means the excuse of 'the tech isn't ready' is gone.
What we'd build next
For most mid-market teams we'd prioritise three things, in this order: a retrieval layer that can cite itself, a routing layer that knows when to hand off, and an evaluation dashboard that leadership can read without a data scientist in the room.
