Data Room

Your engineers just told you they can build this in a few weeks. They’re probably right. What they haven’t told you is what it costs to keep it running, who maintains it when the models change, and what happens the day maintaining it stops being anyone’s job. That’s the cost the sprint estimate never accounts for.

Product leaders keep telling us the same thing: “We tried using Claude for this, the output wasn’t actionable. We just couldn’t act on it.” That gap between impressive summary and actual product decision is what this piece is about. Where LLMs fall short, what the research says, and what we’ve learned building Bagel AI.

There’s a conversation happening in every product org right now. Someone on the team, usually someone smart and well-intentioned, says: “Why don’t we just build this ourselves?” They’re talking about product intelligence. The ability to pull customer feedback from sales calls, support tickets, CRM notes, and product usage data, connect it all together, and turn…