DUNCAN McLEOD: Up and running with AI

I converse with an AI chatbot at least a dozen times a day, often using natural voice conversation — and I can never go back to the world as it was before.

Whether it’s OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, AI has become an indispensable part of my day, whether I’m at work or at home. It is becoming enmeshed in much of what I do.

And I’m not alone.

For millions and millions (soon, billions) of people, AI is becoming like a second brain, helping them manage their work lives and, increasingly, their personal lives.

I admit I was a little sceptical about the potential of the technology when ChatGPT launched. But I’m now convinced it’s going to change the world in fundamental respects.

One of the ways I use ChatGPT daily is to help me craft headlines. I don’t use AI to write copy; in fact, the editorial team at TechCentral — the publication I edit — is banned from using it to generate content for articles. But it’s a wonderful tool for brainstorming headlines.

“Give it a little more punch,” I prod it if I don’t like its initial suggestions. Even if I don’t use any of its suggestions, the process helps get the creative juices flowing.

I also use the software extensively to summarise documents or long YouTube videos that I don’t have time to read or watch. I use it for a quick summary of a topic I need to learn more about at short notice — for example, I might ask it to “tell me what’s involved in moving from the 3-nanometre to the 2nm process node in chip manufacturing”.

I have programmer friends who use generative AI tools such as Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot — an AI assistant that helps take the grunt work out of building software. They all say the technology has had a meaningful effect on their productivity, even though it’s still far from perfect.

I use an Italian-designed productivity and task management app called Akiflow, which recently launched an AI assistant called Aki that helps manage my diary and to-do list.

If I need to remember to call someone the next morning, I ask Aki — using my voice — to “remind me to call Joe Bloggs at 8am on Monday”. Instantly, the reminder is in my calendar. It can even help me schedule appointments automatically. I use it to prompt me about article and column ideas, too. And it helps me prioritise my to-do lists, reminding me what it thinks is most urgent (it’s usually right). It’s great software.

And then there’s Otter.ai, a software tool that uses AI to generate meeting transcripts, summaries and follow-up actions. It can even attend online meetings on my behalf, giving me a summary of what I missed — useful when I have two Teams calls at the same time (it happens).

I use AI when I’m commuting or driving to meetings. Instead of listening to a podcast or streaming music, I sometimes fire up ChatGPT or Gemini on my car’s audio system and converse about a topic I’m interested in.

And we’re just at the beginning of this revolution: agentic AI — involving autonomous agents capable of making decisions and even taking actions on the user’s behalf — promises to supercharge productivity and make life’s daily chores and tasks easier by taking care of some of the repetitive grunt work humans really don’t need to do any more.

A few weeks ago, I asked ChatGPT to generate a week’s worth of vegetarian dinner recipes that were simple and easy to prepare. I then copied the recipes it generated into Aki and asked Aki to add the meal plans to my diary at 6pm daily for the next week. It did it all, without a mistake.

What’s next? Integration with the likes of Checkers Sixty60 would be fantastic — my AI agent could place the order for the ingredients I need for the week’s meals, and it could be delivered to me based on my location and availability. This could be entirely automated.

Now imagine integrating agentic AI into automation platforms such as IFTTT (If This Then That), where apps and services can be stitched together without coding. My AI agent might switch the geyser on an hour earlier in the morning because it knows I must leave early for a flight, for example.

We’ve only begun to scratch the surface here. AI will eventually be integrated into everything. Keen to meet me for lunch? Don’t be surprised if my AI agent has a chat with your AI agent to sync our diaries and suggest a restaurant convenient to us both. I promise not to send a robot in my place.

McLeod is editor of TechCentral