Does a solution have to contain machine learning to be good or to tap into the voice of the many – do we need to have an LLM?

In many cases, the answer might be no, for sure not as the first solution. If you consider recommender systems or reranking models, simply reordering them according to recency can significantly improve the experience.

But of course, don’t stop there. There can be many more things to try which might be possible improvements. However, one of the most significant issues of recommender development is that it is tough to evaluate a system without testing it on users. If you have a simple idea that could improve your KPI, it will likely earn you a lot of money while battling with more complex algorithms.

Having something simple in production also enables you to start evaluating and monitoring and ensure you have set up the collection of data needed before adding more complexity to the system. A simple solution also provides you not only evidence and data that could enable your (machine learning model/)system to become even better. If nothing else, it provides a benchmark to compare to the much more complex solution.