How to Tell What AI You Actually Need for a Job (LOL Yes There’s a Prompt)

Source: Nate’s Newsletter Date: 2025-10-14 URL: https://natesnewsletter.substack.com/p/how-to-tell-what-ai-you-need-for

Summary

Nate argues organizations treat AI as a binary choice (chat or agent) when it’s actually a spectrum requiring precise problem-to-solution matching. Teams jump from ChatGPT to agents without diagnosing actual needs. He offers a diagnostic taxonomy mapping six distinct AI solution types to specific business tasks, based on his experience building and advising on AI projects.

Implications

Agent product strategy thread. Six distinct AI solution types mapped to task categories is a practitioner-built taxonomy that enterprise teams need. The gap between “we should use AI” and “we should use this specific type of AI for this specific task” is where most enterprise AI strategies fail.

AI economics thread. Right-sizing AI to task type prevents wasteful over-engineering — the economic implication is that every enterprise deploying agents for tasks that need only chat tools is paying a 10x premium unnecessarily.

Watch: Whether the six-type taxonomy Nate builds becomes a standard enterprise AI planning framework, and whether any formal methodology frameworks adopt similar task-type diagnostic approaches.