Nobody told you what to actually do with it.

What I actually did with AI after the novelty wore off.

My wife Jill used AI on her phone before I did.

She didn’t go looking for it. Apple pushed an update to her iPhone last year, and Siri got smarter overnight. She asked it something one morning — I don’t even remember what — and it gave her a real answer. A good one. Better than Siri had ever been.

She played with it for a few minutes. Asked it a couple more things. And then she put her phone down and went on with her day.

“It’s like a better Google,” she told me later. And that was it.

She wasn’t trying to figure out AI. She wasn’t reading articles or watching tutorials. She just asked a question, got a good answer, and moved on. It didn’t change how she spent her morning. It didn’t change how she spent her afternoon. She still did the same things the same way she’d done them the week before.

I don’t think Jill was disappointed. I don’t think she knew she should be. And honestly, maybe she shouldn’t be. She asked a tool a question and got a good answer.

But something was sitting on the other side of that moment that she couldn’t see yet. And I almost missed it too.

The same wall

My daughter Whitney owns half of my digital marketing agency. For years she ran businesses, managed people, handled things I didn’t even see. When ChatGPT launched, she picked it up faster than most — writing reports, checking grammar, building guides and PDF documents. She uses it every week.

And when the work is done, she closes the laptop. Same feeling Jill had. That was helpful. But beyond that, so what?

Whitney is 30 years younger than me. She grew up with technology in her hands. And she hit the exact same wall Jill did — she could see it worked, she just couldn’t see what it had to do with her actual life.

The people writing about AI assume you already know why it matters. They skip straight to prompts and workflows and agents. They never stop to answer the first question most people actually have:

OK, but what would I even use this for?

One more minute

Just over three years ago, the month ChatGPT launched, I sat down and hit the same wall. Same blank stare at a tool that clearly worked but didn’t obviously belong anywhere in my day.

But I tried one more thing. I asked it to draft a reply to one of our agency clients — a local business owner who had questions about his rankings. What came back sounded like it was written by a chatbot at a phone company. Polite. Empty. The kind of message you delete without reading.

So I started telling it about me. How I talk. What this client actually needed. The history between us. What I was trying to accomplish with this email.

The reply got better. Then better again. And somewhere in that loop — feeding it more about who I am and watching the output sharpen — something clicked that had nothing to do with saving time.

Teaching the AI about me made me clearer about what I actually wanted to say.

I stopped asking what AI could do. I started wrestling with a different question: why would I have it do it for me?

The question underneath

That question cracked everything open. Because answering “why” forced me to look at how I was actually spending my time — and admit that most of it wasn’t where I wanted it. I was spending my best hours on the work that kept everything running, and I had nothing left for the work that made it all worth running in the first place.

Everyone is fascinated that AI can generate art, write poetry, compose music. And it can. But here’s what actually changed my life: AI drafts my Tuesday afternoon emails well enough that I have two hours to go create the art myself.

Jill’s moment with Siri wasn’t a failure. It was the first step. She just didn’t have the second question yet. Neither did Whitney. And for just over three years, almost nobody writing about AI has bothered to help people find it.

They’re too busy showing you what the tool can do. The question that matters is what you do once the tool handles the rest.

The bottom line

I don’t have this figured out. I’m 59, I run several businesses from my home in West Virginia, and I’m still in the middle of it — rebuilding the body, rethinking the work, trying to spend my hours on things I’d actually choose. Some weeks I get it right. Some weeks I don’t.

But that question — why would I have it do it for me — keeps leading somewhere interesting. And I’d rather think about it out loud than by myself.

So here’s my question for you this week: When was the last time you tried an AI tool, thought “that’s neat,” and then went right back to doing everything the same way? What would it take to ask the second question?

If that hits, reply and tell me about it. I read every one.

That’s all for this week.

See you next Saturday.

— BG