Indexed by the job, not the product
Start from the task in front of you, not from a list of product names.
Software directories are organised the way vendors think, by category and brand. That only helps if you already know what category you are in. This index is keyed the other way round: the thing you are trying to get done, and what a tool would actually have to handle to be useful at it.
Tasks
What the work involves, and what that demands of anything claiming to help.
Write something repeatedly
Newsletters, listings, product copy
The hard part is not the first draft, it is the fiftieth one still sounding like the first. Consistency of voice and format matters more than raw generation.
- Holding a tone across many pieces
- Reusing structure without reusing sentences
- Keeping facts straight between versions
Turn a pile of documents into an answer
Contracts, invoices, statements
Extraction is only half of it. The question is what happens when a document does not match the expected shape, because in a real business most of them do not.
- Reading scans and photographs, not just clean files
- Flagging uncertainty instead of guessing
- Getting the data somewhere useful afterwards
Answer the same question all day
Customer questions, internal queries
Volume is the easy case. The value is in how cleanly it hands over when it cannot answer, and whether it ever states something that is not true.
- Knowing the limits of what it has been told
- Handing over to a person without friction
- Staying current as the answers change
Make images for a channel
Listings, social, ads
Generating an image is solved. Producing the same image at six sizes, on brand, week after week, is the part that takes the time.
- Consistency across a set, not one good result
- Sizes and crops per channel
- Rights and usage, which vary by tool
Each entry says what the task demands before any product is named. That order is deliberate: it is the only way to tell whether a tool is a fit or merely impressive.