About five weeks ago I set up an AI assistant for myself. I'd heard the full spectrum - that it was a complete waste of time, and that it was the most powerful productivity tool ever invented. So I gave it a shot.
The setup wasn't easy. The software is built for engineers, and I'm a designer. I'm comfortable in a terminal and I understand how things are structured programmatically, but it was still a solid day of head-banging before it was working. The reason I pushed through is because of what makes it different from something like ChatGPT.
Regular AI chat is great, but you're limited to whatever you can copy and paste in and out. What's different here is that your assistant connects directly to the platforms you actually work in. For me that's Gmail, Google Calendar, Todoist, Google Drive, Xero, Monday, Notion. All of a sudden you have the most powerful AI models ever built able to read and write data to the tools you use every day.
I named mine Baymax. I talk to it through Telegram like I'd message a colleague. I can say "hey, move the call with Sarah to 4pm" and it does it. I can say "find the transcript from my call with Greenfield Electrical somewhere in Google Drive, read it, and build me a branded service agreement PDF" - and it goes and does that too. It hunts through my files, reads the transcript, works out what was discussed, pulls my brand assets, and sends me a finished document to review. That's not a chatbot. That's a junior employee.
I've since set it up for a few other people. My wife is a DJ - she's not particularly techy, but she chats to hers and it builds her run sheets and organises her playlists for the weekend. A guy who runs an NDIS company uses his to schedule staff. Another bloke with a medical supply business has his scraping the internet for leads and sending personalised outreach each morning.
The pattern I keep seeing is that onboarding an AI assistant is like onboarding an employee. You have to define the job, give it the right access, write it a handbook, and expect it to be rough at first. But once it clicks, you wonder how you worked without it.
I'm still figuring out everything mine can do. But five weeks in, I'm not going back.