Everyone is talking about AI. But here's the thing: most of the time, when people say "AI," they actually mean LLMs, and that distinction matters more than you'd think.
Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are extraordinary general-purpose tools. They reason, write, summarise, and navigate ambiguity with remarkable fluency. But "general purpose" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The same quality that makes LLMs so flexible, their broad, probabilistic understanding of language and intent, can also make them slower, more expensive, and less precise than tools built for a specific job.
Consider image recognition. Classifying whether a product photo meets certain criteria, detecting defects on a production line, or reading a vehicle registration plate: these are solved problems. Dedicated computer vision models handle them faster, at lower cost, and with higher accuracy than asking an LLM to "look at this image." The same applies to OCR (extracting structured text from documents), speech-to-text transcription, and a wide range of classification and prediction tasks that machine learning has been quietly excelling at long before the current wave of AI excitement.
None of this is a criticism of LLMs. They genuinely shine in the places specialist tools struggle: understanding context and nuance, handling messy or ambiguous input, combining information from multiple sources, and generating natural language output that a human can actually act on. Sometimes the simplicity of a single tool outweighs the gains of a more elaborate setup, and the right answer genuinely is to use an LLM for everything. The real skill is in knowing which approach fits, and that kind of architectural thinking is exactly where experience counts.
When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The organisations getting the most value from AI right now have a fuller toolbox, and more importantly, they know which tool to reach for. Knowing when to use an LLM, when to pair it with a specialist tool, or when to skip the LLM altogether, that's how you build the best possible experience for your business and your customers.