What would you like your AI assistant to take off your plate?
— By Christopher Lynch
Choose one useful job for your AI assistant, see what it could do, and find a practical place to start.
What would you like your AI assistant to take off your plate?
You have an idea at the gym. It could make your client onboarding better, but you will not have time to work on it until later.
What if you could say it out loud and come back to a first-week checklist and a welcome email draft?
Or walk into your next meeting with the background already gathered, the gaps clearly marked and the important questions in front of you?
These are useful places to begin with a personal AI assistant. Start with a piece of work you recognize and would be happy to hand over.
A good question from The AI Daily Brief
Nathaniel Whittemore's October 4 episode, How to Choose Your Personal AI Agent, is worth putting on your listening list. Its published description covers the choices around work and personal use, models, setup and privacy.
The show's companion quiz lets you explore the options and see the reasoning behind its matches. It credits Every's personal-agent comparison for the product information.
Take a look, and listen to the episode. Then bring the question back to your day: what would you like an assistant to take off your plate?
Give it a whole small job
The onboarding idea is a good example. You could ask your assistant to turn it into a practical plan, work out what information is missing and prepare the first draft you will need.
Later, when you are safely parked, you might add one detail by voice: make the welcome email warmer and keep the checklist to one page. At your desk, you review the dates, responsibilities and promises before using it.
The value is the work that moves forward between the idea and your review.
Ethan Mollick's The Dot and the Swarm describes agents becoming better at finding context and organizing work with less step-by-step direction. That opens up useful possibilities for people who know what a good result looks like but have little time to manage every step.
Our practical recommendation is to start small enough to check the result easily.
Four useful places to start
A rough idea becomes a plan. Your assistant organizes the next steps and drafts the first thing you need.
A meeting becomes easier to prepare for. It gathers the relevant background and shows what needs a decision.
Follow-ups become easier to keep moving. It finds the loose ends and prepares the replies for review.
A repeated question becomes quicker to answer. It looks through the information you choose and brings back an answer with its source.
The right choice is the one that would make your own week easier.
Make the setup fit your day
ChatGPT can be a useful starting point. Claude, Gemini or an assistant in your existing work tools may fit better. Start with what you already use and the job you want done.
An individual may value voice and a simple daily routine. A team may need shared information and a clear person to review the work. Both benefit from deciding what the assistant can see and which actions still need a person.
That human checkpoint is a useful theme in Mollick's Agency and Agents. Getting the setup right includes knowing when the assistant should come back to you.
You can try a small, made-up example first. If it is useful, connect the information it really needs and test the workflow. After a few attempts, compare the whole job, including your checking and corrections, with how you did it before.
Find your starting point
Our assessment asks five quick questions and shows you one practical workflow, a concrete example and an instruction to try. The result is yours without an email signup.
Find your AI starting point
If you would like help getting it working, Intuitive Context helps you choose the tools, connect the right information and test the workflow with you. We start with one person and two useful tasks, then agree what should come next.
Set this up with Intuitive Context
Examples are illustrative; available features depend on your setup.
How to Choose Your Personal AI Agent