The mindset that I feel is lacking in the ML/AI community is that we should be creating systems that can be augmented and improved using AI, the product itself should stand alone without using any AI at all. This is similar to how JIT compilation can improve the machine code as the program runs. Part of how our own brains work is that the cerebral cortex doesn't really have any direct control over the body at all, it can only watch and identify patterns and project intentions to the the rest of the brain/body. This is a passive structure initially, it observes both the environment and how the lower structure interact with that environment. Only after it's observed and learned the "commands" can it begin to influence how the body moves around and interacts with the world. You could look at the CLI terminal as an example, on it's own I can interact and use it perfectly fine. But lets say I added some patterning matching and prediction AI that could make really good suggestions about what command I will type next, at some point you could promote these suggestions so that they always execute when the AI predicts you would use it. This is exactly how the brain works.
Most of my ideas of applied AI revolve around improving our HID interfaces to computers themselves. For example, I'd like to reduce our chances of developing RSI related to keyboard/mouse/trackpad usage and I feel that chorded keyboards are more ergonomic. But chorded keyboards are slower to use and harder to learn. The mapping of the chords is where I plan to apply some AI, initially I'm going to randomize how chords are bound to character inputs, these random values will use many fingers to input 1 character. As the user learns and uses the chords to input characters the AI can identify common patterns and promote those patterns into chords that use less and less fingers to input, thus improving the input speed potential of the user. The next place to use AI in this project would be autocorrection and using the user's input context(program, filetype, time, surrounding text) to continue improving these bindings and making completion suggestions.