We've all been there.
It's Monday. You open your calendar and see what's coming up this week. You follow up on unread Slack messages and emails. You look at last week's performance and numbers. You try to get yourself organised for the week ahead.
Then the first meeting starts.
Then the next one.
Then the next one.
And suddenly the day is gone.
The next few days look pretty similar, with a few more tasks appearing along the way. By Friday, you finally get some focus time. Time to step back, think properly, connect the dots, and make sure nothing gets carried into the following week.
Happy Saturday.
At some point, I started wondering: where could AI actually help with this?
Spoiler alert : No vibe coding involved.
Team productivity - it's not about productivity
When we talk about AI with our teams, productivity is usually the first thing that comes up. If you're leading a team, I don't think the answer is simply to tell everyone to start using AI.
The more useful question is: where could it actually help this person?
That will be different for everyone. Someone might use it as a sparring partner when they need to work through an idea. Someone else might use it to analyse metrics or prepare for a customer conversation. It can also be surprisingly useful as a sort of personal development coach, helping you think through a difficult conversation, reflect on something that happened, or prepare for an executive level meeting.
Documentation and summarising are useful too, of course. But they're not the interesting part for me. The interesting part is figuring out where AI fits naturally into someone's way of working.
And I think that has to be quite personal. What works for one person might be completely useless to another.
Where it helped : Curate based on needs and development areas.
Seeing the bigger picture
One thing we all struggle with is simply keeping a tab of everything that is going on. There is always too much.
Projects, discussions, decisions, priorities, people, dependencies. And somehow you're expected to understand how all of it fits together.
It's become much easier to take a lot of information and turn it into something I can look at. A visualisation, a map, a structure, whatever makes sense for the problem.
And the visualisation isn't really the point. It's what you notice when you can finally see everything in one place. You start seeing connections.
You notice that two things are actually overlapping. You see where something is missing. You realise that a team is working on something that another team is already solving.
Things that are difficult to spot when you're looking at individual documents suddenly become much more obvious.
Where it helped : Bringing clarity and building connections
Having genuine conversations
There is another side to this.
I’ve seen people start using AI because they feel they are expected to, rather than because it actually helps them.
And you can usually tell. Everything starts sounding the same. There are more words than there need to be. Jargon appears where it doesn't belong. Words don't make sense.
That's when I think it's useful to push back.
"Would you actually say it like that?"
"What are you really trying to say?"
"Do we need this much text?"
If AI helped you write it, great. But do you agree with it? Can you explain it? Would you say the same thing in a room full of people?
Where it helped : Critical thinking and real conversations
So what changed for me?
I started out thinking AI would mainly help us get things done faster. It does. But that's not where I've found the biggest value.
The bigger opportunity is having something that can give you another perspective. Something that can help you make sense of a messy situation, challenge an assumption, connect information, or prepare for a conversation you don't particularly want to have.
And as a leader, that's probably where I've found the most value.
So I don't really want my team to "use AI."
I want them to find the places where it genuinely makes them better at what they do.
Maybe that's the shift I'm most interested in.
Not asking:
"How do we get people to use AI?"
But:
"How can AI help this person think, work and grow a little better?"
That's a much more interesting question.