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What can you do if you’re struggling to find AI use cases to apply to your personal life? |
You can read all the articles in the world about writing loops, speaking to AI with your voice, or experimenting with subagents -- but strategy guides can quickly become reading for entertainment instead of execution. |
If you’ve been hearing about folks (like me) talk enthusiastically about the upside of AI but you’re yet to have your own “aha!” moment where it all clicks, this one is for you. |
Today I want to break down: |
Why you don’t need to be technical (nor a business owner) to benefit from AI The framework for finding unlimited AI uses cases in your personal life Why pivoting from “use cases” to “problems” makes a lot of sense
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—@dharmesh |
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Everybody Can Benefit from AI |
Everybody can (probably) benefit from AI in some way. I really believe that. |
There is a pattern of self-limiting beliefs I have observed among folks who are AI-curious but don’t yet consider themselves knowledgable enough to be “AI people”. |
(Let me quickly note something about this: This newsletter has 2.5 million subscribers (thank you!). There are readers at all experience levels. You don’t need to consider yourself an “AI person” to be a part of this. It’s why the newsletter is named simple AI. |
Some question whether they need to be a business owner to benefit from AI. Or if they’re even technical enough to bother trying to level up their AI expertise. |
But you don’t need to be technical to use AI. And you don’t need to be a business owner to benefit from AI. |
Businesses are problem factories. A business owner rarely has to look too far before stumbling upon something that could be better optimized. When a problem costs you hours or dollars, you’re incentivized to notice it, whether you’re a corporation, a family, or a teenager. |
It’s just that a company with hundreds of salespeople typically gets more excited about HubSpot solving their pipeline problems than a teenager. And a solopreneur with a side-gig will be more interested in YouSpot, my new AI-native personal CRM, than a retiree studying renaissance art. |
The more a problem costs you, the more motivated you are to solve it. |
Just because you don’t have shareholders to answer to doesn’t mean you can’t leverage AI to improve your quality of life in a tangible way. It just means you’ll need to pay a bit more attention to your own habits and routines to identify the potential areas of improvement. |
The secret to finding use cases starts with a step that only you can take. You need to put your personal day-to-day life under a microscope to find where AI fits in. |
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How to Find Unlimited AI Use Cases |
Before I share a simple framework for finding unlimited AI use cases, I need to briefly get you up to speed on what could be the most important part of leveling up your AI knowledge: you need to be using the tools. Often. |
You don’t need to be an engineer. You don’t need to own a business. And you don’t need to be as smart as the legendary Andrej Karpathy, thankfully. |
But you do need to be using the tools. Whether you’re a marketer, a musician, or a money manager, building the habit of actually using AI tools is not optional if you want to get better with AI. It’s the bare minimum.
I have two ideas for doing that (and only one of them is self-serving: |
Idea 1: Use OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude on a daily basis, do what you can to change that. Put an icon right on your home screen so you see it every day. Create a scheduled task every morning or evening where the AI messages you first, so you don’t forget.
Idea 2: If you’re a solopreneur, creator or someone with a side-gig, sign-up for YouSpot. connect your Gmail or Outlook account. Then every day you’ll get a daily briefing email from the YouSpot AI agent that summarizes what’s going on in your world with recommended actions. Hundreds of people get these every day and people love it. What’s even cooler is you can just respond to the email and ask follow-up questions and the YouSpot Agent will respond. It uses the most powerful frontier models available and it’s one of the simplest ways to make AI a daily habit. I’ll even give you a 20% discount on the usual $10/month price for being a Simple AI newsletter reader. |
Doesn’t matter which path you pick, you just need to be committed to using these tools if you want to get better with them. No excuses. |
Now, how can you find more uses for AI in your personal life? Try looking into one of four broader categories: |
Repeat. Things you do every week more or less the same way each time. Dread. Things you put off because they’re tedious or intimidating, like a contract negotiation with your internet service provider, or an insurance claim. Wish. Things that you would do if you had more time. I recently shared my own list of this variety in my newsletter on how I expand my capacity by delegating to AI. Firsts. Things you’ve never done before. Billions of people have been through your first time, whatever it is, and AI has read what they wrote down.
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The truth is the perfect AI use case for one person will sound boring to another person. You need to spend some time looking inwards at where you are spending your time (Repeat) and effort (Dread) to find the right fit for you. |
If looking inwards doesn’t help, consider what extra things you would get done if you hired a smart college-educated assistant. That assistant could expand your capacity by knocking off all your Wish items. |
This reminds me of the advice I gave on stage at INBOUND last year: every time you sit down at a computer to do something, try it first with AI and see if it can help. That covers your Firsts. |
Don’t overthink it, just give it a shot. |
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Point AI At The Problem |
The “aha!” moment doesn’t come from reading about AI. It comes when you’ve pointed AI at a real problem you’re experiencing yourself. |
If you’re struggling to come up with “use cases”, consider reframing around hunting “problems”. Even on your best days, I’m sure it’s never too difficult to remember a couple of problems waiting for you around the corner. |
AI can’t solve all your problems, but you will develop your own AI intuition of what problems it can help you with over time. It all begins by making sure you’re actually using the tools on a regular basis. |
Plus, on the problems it can’t attack on its own, AI can at least be your sparring partner as you think through what a solution could look like. |
If you don’t mind me asking, how often are you using AI today and what do you use? Hit reply and let me know the answer. I’m always curious how you folks are using AI 🙂. |
—Dharmesh (@dharmesh) |
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