I’m coming at it from the standpoint of implementing an AI model into a suite of applications. Which I have done. I have even trained a custom version of a model to fit our needs.
Plugging into an API is more or less trivial (as you said), but that’s only a single aspect of an application. And that’s assuming that you’re using someone else’s API and not running and implementing the model yourself.
You can make it as complicated as you want, of course.
Out of curiosity, what use-case did you find for it? I’m always interested to see how AI is actually applied in real settings.