Before you buy: the one-week test for any AI tool
Someone pitches you an AI tool every week now. The demo always works — it is the vendor's best day, run on the vendor's example. Then you subscribe, use it twice, and pay for it for a year. A one-week test on your own work costs nothing and tells you far more.
- Pick one boring, repeated job. The thing you or your staff do twenty times a month, not the impressive one-off. Repetition is where savings live.
- Write down what it costs today. Minutes per run, runs per week, who does it. Without that number you will never know if the tool won.
- Feed it last week's real work. Ten actual cases where you already know the right answer — messy ones included. Failures a polished demo hides show up immediately.
- Keep a human on the send button. Tally each output: shipped as-is, lightly edited, or thrown away. That ratio is your real quality score.
- Decide on a number, not a feeling. If it doesn't save an hour a week or clearly win you work, cancel before the trial ends — and put the renewal date in your calendar today.
The tools change every month; this test doesn't. It's the same one I run before putting any agent in front of a client's customers.