The Strangest AI Use Case I Saw This Year Was a Law Firm's Fax Bot
Forget reasoning breakthroughs. The most valuable AI deployment I encountered handled a machine most people forgot existed.
Everyone wants to talk about AGI. The most useful thing I saw an AI do this year was read incoming faxes at a personal-injury firm and file them.
Fax is not dead in law and medicine. It is embarrassing but real. A human spent three hours a day sorting them. An AI now reads the page, pulls the case number, routes it, and flags the urgent ones.
No model breakthrough required. Just a vision model, a rules file, and a problem nobody at a conference talks about.
I loved it because it was unglamorous and saved real hours. The frontier gets the funding. The fax bot gets the work done.
If you are hunting for AI value in your own business, skip the keynote. Look for the task someone dreads and does by hand. That is where the money actually is.