Part of the narrative in AI advertising focuses on speed. Almost everyone asks you, “Why spend hours doing something when you can do it in five minutes?”

And it is true, with AI you can do things in five minutes, or even in seconds. Complex tasks like creating an app or a website. You launch a prompt and that is it.

It all sounds so nice, but time spent is not your main problem and the hours you save are not the solution. You are not ahead of anyone, you just let AI creating something mediocre and out of control.

The Prompt Dilemma

Everyone knows that a prompt is a request or instruction we give to AI to help it understand what kind of result we want. The clearer and more detailed the prompt is, the better the result will be.

No one mention that the work required to write a complete prompt is sometimes absurd. AI is as close to human intelligence as it gets, smart but still subject to interpretation, because it is thanks to its ability to interpret that it can deliver excellent results, often very similar to what we humans create.

You can write a generic, quick prompt with no real expectations, and what you will get from AI will be exactly that, a generic result, just medicore, then you continue sending more prompts to improve what you have.

Or you can write a prompt full of snippets and shortcodes, detailed to the extreme, which still requires a huge amount of time and effort to imagine everything you would want AI to produce. And then you keep going, modifying, improving, and adding more.

That is the exact moment when all the talk about how fast AI is at creating things in five seconds is no longer true. It is no longer that fast, that immediate, or that convenient as they sell it to you.

AI Isn’t the Market Whisperer

“Ship faster,” with constant product updates, new features every week, all at the incredible speed of light thanks to AI.

Do you know what all this is for? Nothing.

Users are fine in waiting months to see something new released, and it’s not the quantity but the quality that makes the difference. If there are bugs, bad UX, or if it’s not clear and easy to use, the average user will leave.

They need time to keep up with the new features, they need onboarding, maybe some support tickets because not everything works as it should.

And all of this already exists. The market doesn’t need a new product, nobody cares if you made it with AI in half a day, it’s just another useless product in a saturated market where the ones who make a difference are those who stand out with quality.

The market is focused on understanding what the real problem is right now and how to make money by solving it. AI can’t help with that.

AI works well only when the prompt is clear and complete, but the market doesn’t come with ready-made prompts. There are no detailed instructions or briefings. You have to study the data, figure out what parts of your user experience work or don’t, run A/B tests to see which option is better etc.

What’s behind a product, a service, or a brand? Why was it made the way it is? If you don’t know these things, how can you move forward? It is problematic when no one fully understands what’s behind the product because everything was handed off to AI.

It’s even worse if the product can’t grow and scale. Even though AI can be trained to help with scaling, if the person creating the prompts doesn’t know what they’re doing, the market impact can turn it all into a disaster.

When AI Hits Your Wallet

Are we really sure AI is cost-effective?

If I need credits or a monthly subscription just to send prompts, I will always have to pay this to keep the project I’m building with AI alive. So it’s always going to be a cost. On top of that, you have to add the cost of the person writing the prompts, and the person managing the project, like a project manager would.

There’s also a hidden cost, the price you might pay later to fix problems that were ignored at the start. I’ve often been contacted by companies who initially went for cheap, fast solutions to save money, but then struggled to grow their project or keep it going because they didn’t have a strong foundation.

When something costs little and promises a lot with minimal effort, it’s usually not as cost-effective as it seems. Like we said before, real market problems take time and resources to work through day by day.

No, you don’t need to do things in five minutes

The promise of AI as a tool that lets you work faster and cheaper sounds great, but the reality is more complicated. Speed alone doesn’t solve the real challenges of the market. Quality, understanding the problem deeply, building a solid foundation, and knowing your product inside out are what really matter.

You don’t need shortcuts or AI doing things for you without taking responsibility. You don’t need to be so fast if the market will never be interested in embracing your project.

It has never been just about shipping faster.