A friend of mine who owns a PR firm sent me a link one day back in December and said, “Check out this really cool tool.”
So I set up an account, not really knowing what it was or how to use it. My first prompt was, “Tell me about SSO and how it works.” Maybe that seems like a strange first question, but at the time we were rolling out a new feature, and like many lean teams in the earlier stages of building out product marketing, the handoff from development to marketing was not exactly rich with detail. There were no real use cases. No messaging. No positioning. Nothing that could help build excitement around why this feature would actually matter to customers or how it might make their lives easier.
So I figured I would ask ChatGPT. It responded within seconds, and my immediate reaction was, whoa, that is cool. I remember messaging my friend right after and sharing how surprised I was. Not because I suddenly thought AI was going to replace everything, but because I could immediately see that this was going to be useful.
That has really been my approach to ChatGPT so far. I am not using it as some kind of all-knowing machine, and I am definitely not asking it to do all of my work for me. What I am using it for right now is much more practical.
I use it when I need to understand something quickly, especially when I am dealing with technical information that needs to be translated into something clearer and more useful. I use it to help me get a starting point when the information I have been handed is incomplete, overly technical, or not framed in a way that helps me do my job well. I use it when I need to organize my thoughts, explore an idea, or pressure-test how something might be understood from a customer point of view.
In the case of SSO, I was not looking for a final answer I could copy and paste into a launch email or blog post. What I needed was a faster way to get my head around the topic so I could start asking better questions. What does this actually solve? Why would a customer care? What kind of pain point does it reduce? How should this be explained in a way that feels clear and useful instead of overly technical?
That is a much better use of a tool like this than just asking it to write polished content and hoping for the best.
I think that is why I am less interested in the hype around AI writing everything for you and more interested in what it can unlock when you are in the middle of figuring something out. Those early messy stages of work, where you are trying to understand, shape, clarify, and connect the dots, are where I am finding the most value right now.
It is also making me think differently about the nature of knowledge work in general.
There are so many moments in a typical workday where the real bottleneck is not necessarily skill. It is speed. It is time. It is the friction of having to dig for information, translate complexity, or get unstuck when you are staring at something that has not been fully thought through by the people handing it to you. In those moments, ChatGPT can be surprisingly helpful. That does not mean it is always right. It does not mean it replaces expertise, context, or judgment. What it does mean is that it can help move the work forward in a way that feels genuinely useful. Right now, that is what I am paying attention to most. Not the grand claims. Not the predictions. Just the practical ways it can support the work that is already in front of me. And for me, that starts with helping me make sense of things faster.