When building AI chat is actually hard (how and why we built our agents)

We shipped our first AI features in late 2025, long after many other companies who built RAG chatbots starting in early 2023. That sounds late, but I don't think it is. It's a product of how our category constrains us, how we think about prioritizing features and how what looks easy is often hard (and vice-versa). Let's start with the first part: What we built and why I'm super thoughtful about what we built. I've seen enough features rushed into the market to jump on a trend (remember NFTs?) and decided we wouldn't fall into this trap. Just for context, we split our AI features into three distinct assistants, two of which are currently live. The billing assistant (available now) automates repetitive workflows. For instance, users can say "Give customers in Canada a 10% discount for the next 3 months" instead of manually creating the coupon and its expiry, filtering by customers and applying to each. The finance assistant (in early access) is a text-to-SQL agent that generates custom r