Thoughtful AI integration beats bolted-on Clippy
Like many, I've been exploring how AI can assist my work and that of my colleagues. The theme is consistent: it’s about giving AI the right context so it helps us do our jobs better — not replace us.
I appreciated this piece from Lullabot: Smart AI integration: moving beyond chatbots and quick fixes
There’s a difference between AI that’s thoughtfully integrated and AI that’s just tacked on. Too often, we encounter AI implementations that feel like modern-day Clippy, popping up to “help” us in ways that miss the mark. Most AI implementations feel like afterthoughts...because they are.
This is good mental fuel (and a persuasive piece to share) and I’m looking forward to expanding on a small prototype we built in Drupal (D10.4, ECA 2, and the contrib AI module). With a bit of glue code to expose a PDF’s extracted text as a token and a new “Send to AI” workflow state, editors can kick off assistance when it’s useful — not by default.
In the example workflow, the system:
- fetches the text of an uploaded PDF
- sends it to ChatGPT
- returns a short summary
- proposes a title
But that's just the technical tooling, we still need to make sure the AI has a well document IA to leverage.