Seven things I use AI for every day at work

I wrote a first version of this article in January 2023, when ChatGPT had been public for two months and everything was new. I've rewritten it because almost none of that still holds: today the question isn't whether AI is useful, but exactly where in the work you put it.

These are the seven uses that survived in my day-to-day. The rest I tried and dropped.

1. Quotes and proposals

This saves me the most time. I give it the type of work, the scope, the estimated hours and the amount, and it returns the breakdown written and ordered. I check the numbers — always — and adjust the tone.

What I learnt: give it your last quote as an example and the result sounds like you. Without an example, it sounds like a brochure.

2. Writing, but from my own material

I don't ask it for whole articles. I give it my notes, the structure I want and the facts, and ask it to order them. Then I rewrite. Text generated from nothing shows, and it shows badly: it says nothing that anyone else couldn't say.

Where it is unbeatable is the tedious part: summarising a meeting, turning an outline into an email, adapting the same message to three formats.

3. Code

This is where the change has been dramatic. In 2023 you asked for snippets and pasted them in. Today I work with the assistant inside the editor and the terminal, with the context of the whole project: refactors, an afternoon's script, repetitive migrations.

The rule I don't break: if I don't understand the code it gives me, it doesn't go in. AI speeds up people who can read what it produces; for everyone else it builds a problem for six months' time.

4. SEO and technical content

For grouping keywords by intent, spotting what a page is missing compared to the ones ranking, and writing titles and descriptions at scale. What it doesn't replace is judgement: what deserves its own page is a business decision.

5. Social media

One message, three tones, three lengths. It works well if you tell it which network it's for and show it how you write. Without that, everything ends up sounding the same: enthusiastic and empty.

6. Email

Drafting long replies from four bullet points and, above all, reviewing before sending: what reads wrong, what's missing, what's surplus. It's a copy editor with judgement, and at that it's very good.

7. Thinking out loud

The least obvious use and perhaps the most valuable. Explaining a business problem and asking it to argue with me: what am I missing, what would someone else do, what happens if I'm wrong. Not to decide for me, but so I'm not deciding alone at eleven at night.

What doesn't work

• Publishing without review. It always shows, and the reputation cost isn't worth the time saved.
• Facts and figures. If they don't come from a source you can open and check, they don't go in the document.
• Asking it for business judgement. It'll give you a reasonable, generic answer, which is exactly what you don't need.

Conclusion

AI hasn't taken work away from me: it's taken away the part of the work that added nothing. What decides the outcome is still the judgement of the person using it, and no subscription sells you that.