Earlier this year, artificial intelligence yielded a practical insight: people like to drink coffee in the morning, so workplaces should find efficient ways to serve coffee. That raised a question that's surprisingly deep -- and can cost serious money to ignore: Is AI actually necessary for this problem? is a question that remains largely unasked in Silicon Valley today. We think it's worth asking. To be sure, modern data products owe a lot of their success to artificial intelligence. Well-considered AI unlocks entirely new types of data-driven insights and cuts the time and money needed for manual data analysis. But ill-considered AI can fail -- expensively.