I have consulted on a number AI Projects. The issue is less whether they're useful, and more, people just want to use ChatGPT, etc. Major AI providers gradually have consumed the use cases once reserved for bespoke apps. In search, consumers wanted to use Google, not your search engine; consumers want to use ChatGPT, not your bot.

Since most companies are bad at building AI/agents (and search), user trust gravitates to a few known brands.

Honestly this has been a pattern for decades in my domain (search) and it seems to extend to the AI space as well.

You can be successful with positioning and expectation setting. Positioning to a niche. Expectation setting that you're not going to drive 10x company value by sprinking AI on it. But you can build something useful for a subset of users. Companies need to start with low ambitions, not big ones.

You can also be successful just using AI for non-chat things. Enriching content or using LLMs in backend processes that aren't user-focused chat.

I think the good uses of AI are places we don't even realize AI is being used.