I'm just in the toying and evaluation phase with Obsidian and so far I like it, but I'd like to understand why an AI is needed or even useful to begin with it? So far I just see a powerful text editor, what did you benefit from with AI use?

Short and sweet: it built out the structure, template layout, and tables in dataview.

Could have just done it without it? Certainly, this just helped me build something more scalable than I knew how to on my own, and then I learned from it. And on an ongoing basis it'll help organize the things in daily notes and inbox and place them appropriately.

To put it another way, it helped me get from 0 to 1 and will do some of the routine maintenance required to move things from my second brain's short-term memory to long-term.