AI advice online tends to sound impressive but useless. Build an agent! Automate everything! Great, but you have emails to write and a meeting in 20 minutes. This lesson is about the practical, everyday stuff.
Email drafts — your most hated task, handled in 60 seconds
Most people spend too long on emails they dread writing. A difficult message to a client. A follow-up that has gone unanswered too long. A complaint you are not sure how to word.
Give AI the context and let it draft. Tell it: "Write a polite but firm email to a supplier who has missed our delivery deadline twice. We need the order by Friday or we need to cancel." Read it, soften anything too blunt, hit send.
This works just as well for positive emails — introductions, thank-yous, updates to stakeholders. Any time you know what you need to say but not how to say it, AI is your starting point.
Try this today: think of one email you have been putting off. Give AI a one-sentence description of what it needs to say and let it draft it for you.
Meeting notes — turning a scattered hour into a clear record
After a long meeting, writing up the notes feels like doing the meeting all over again. AI can do that translation for you.
If your meeting tool gives you a transcript, paste it in and ask: "Summarise this meeting. List the key decisions made and any action items with names attached." You get a clear, shareable record in under a minute.
No transcript? Jot rough notes during the meeting — even messy shorthand works. Paste them in and ask AI to turn them into a clean summary. Your colleagues will think you are extremely organised.
Safe to ignore for now: tools like Otter.ai or Fireflies can record and transcribe meetings automatically. That is a nice upgrade when you are ready. For now, pasting rough notes into a chatbot already gets you 80% of the benefit.
Research — getting up to speed without reading everything
You need to understand a new topic for a presentation or a client call. You have an hour, not a week. AI is very good at giving you the shape of a subject fast.
Ask: "I have to present on supply chain resilience to a non-technical audience. Give me a 5-minute primer — the basics, why it matters, and two real-world examples." You will not be an expert. But you will sound like you have done your homework.
For deeper research, tools like Perplexity are built specifically for this. They pull in current sources and show where they got the information. Use them when you need something more solid than a chatbot chat.
Hard conversations — finding the right words under pressure
Some conversations are genuinely difficult. Giving someone critical feedback. Asking for a raise. Responding to an angry customer. AI can help you prepare.
Tell it: "I need to give feedback to a colleague who keeps interrupting others in meetings. I want to be kind but direct. Help me find the right words." You do not have to use the exact script — but having something concrete in front of you changes how prepared you feel.
You can even ask AI to play the other person and push back on you. Practise the conversation before you have it for real. This is one of the most underused ways people could be using AI every single day.
The key mindset: AI as a collaborator, not a shortcut
None of this works if you treat AI as a machine that produces final answers. Every output it gives you is a starting point, not an endpoint.
Tina Huang puts it simply: AI is not just a tool, it is a skill set. The better you get at directing it, the better your results. That skill grows quickly with daily practice — not by reading about it, but by actually using it.
Pick one task from your actual to-do list today. Not a test task — a real one. Use AI to help with it. That single habit, repeated daily, is how people genuinely change how they work.
Write a [follow-up / request / complaint / thank-you] email to [who]. Situation: [what happened, in one sentence] Goal: [what I need to happen as a result] Tone: [professional / warm / direct] Length: under 150 words