Are you curious whether AI can help make a meaningful difference to a digital product?

In this article, we explore typical motivations for adopting AI—like unlocking large datasets or increasing efficiency—and show why validating your idea first is crucial. There, you’ll discover how a structured approach to research, prototyping, and iteration ensures you’re solving the right problem with the right tool.

But here I’ll give a step-by-step look at how easy it can be to produce a low-cost AI prototype.

A sentiment analysis example

Imagine a client needs a tool to analyze customer feedback and see if it’s positive or negative.

Rather than building a model from scratch, we could use a free pre-trained model from Hugging Face, a popular platform hosting thousands of ready-to-use AI models.

I would start by searching for the type of model that I want—in this case “sentiment.”

You can quickly see that there are thousands of potential ready to use models to evaluate. For this example I chose the second option as it allows you to test it directly inside the website.

Once I have made my choice, I can easily copy the provided Python code and attach a free API key. I would then deploy a lightweight endpoint in the environment to pass customer data to the model and receive quick insights. It could be up and running in minutes, instead of hours or days.

Because this is a prototype, speed and reliability may not be production-grade. But it’s an extremely cost-effective way to validate whether AI-driven sentiment analysis can truly help your business. If it shows promise, then you can invest in refining the model, hosting it in your own environment, and scaling up for real-world demands.

Prototypes don’t have to be complicated or expensive. By using pre-trained AI models, you can quickly assess the viability of a new feature—like sentiment analysis—before going all in.

It’s an agile approach that ensures you make data-driven decisions about when (and how) to adopt AI.