Would it make sense without AI?
Here’s a due diligence question worth adding to your list: describe your product without mentioning AI.
GitHub Copilot becomes autocomplete. Waymo becomes a chauffeur service (aka. Uber). Glean becomes enterprise search (Elastic Search with a nice UI). ElevenLabs becomes a dubbing tool.
Strip the AI framing, the value proposition becomes even more obvious.
Now try it with Humane Pin, Rewind, or Inflection’s Pi1.
If the idea needs AI in the description to sound useful, that’s a yellow flag.
If a user can’t understand the product and its value propositions, mentioning AI doesn’t help. AI is there to amplify — it changes the cost curve (Waymo, before it would have needed a human driver per car), the speed (Copilot ships a suggestion in milliseconds, a senior dev would take hours), or the scale (ElevenLabs dubs into 30 languages without a studio).
The value proposition — get me from A to B safely, help me write faster, localize this content — predates the AI. Founders who lead with AI either obscure a use case or haven’t found their real one yet.
Products that pass the “no-AI test” have a clear user problem, a distribution path, and a reason to exist beyond the current hype cycle. Products that fail it hope investors won’t ask. Ask it early.
A consumer chatbot that existed to showcase model capability, attract acqui-hire interest.