I watched a few videos this morning, looking for ideas of what I could use AI to do.
In one video, someone had an agent monitor tech news sites every 30 minutes to notify him of a variety of developments. No doubt that’s less effort than visiting a bunch of sites every half hour, but not monitoring tech news in real time takes even less effort.
Another video mentioned having Grok Bot order a sandwich through DoorDash. If I want a sandwich, I make a sandwich.
One video showed how to manage dozens messaging services. Maybe you could just not use dozens of messaging services.
And of course there are videos on creating agents to monitor the agents that monitoring your news, ordering your sandwiches, and managing your messages.
All the use cases I saw were ways to using technology mitigate problems caused by technology, making it easier to do things that don’t need to be done, or at least things that I don’t need to do.
Of course different people have different needs. Some people have a professional need to monitor news in real time, for example, and having an agent help with that could be big win. I suspect, however, that the use cases that you’ll see most often in YouTube videos have been made up to appeal to a wide audience rather than to scratch the author’s itch.
Productivity is deeply personal. As I said in an earlier post, the scripts I’ve found most useful are of zero interest to anyone else because they are so specific to my work. I’ve mostly automated tasks with Python and bash, not with AI.
I’m not trying to avoid using AI. As I said at the top of the post I’m looking for more ways to take advantage of it. But I don’t want to fall into the trap of doing more easily what doesn’t need to be done. Or, to put a finer point on it, I don’t want to find ways for my business to do things that we do not need to do, things that other businesses may need to do.