Use it while it's free, and use it for everything

Many of the tools we use daily are adding AI features, and those features are growing increasingly sophisticated. Since it's an early stage, companies are usually easy to convince to give a discount or a trial period. They want to collect as many use cases as they can right now. Notion AI, for example, has been getting a lot of buzz recently, and I was even offered one or two months of free use, depending on whether it's for personal or company purposes.

My rule is to use a tool as much as possible, as long as I'm not paying for it.

Once you get it, whichever way you get it, use it for as many things as possible. Recently, AI agents started popping up in my company's Asana, and I just began throwing things at them randomly, to test what it feels like.

Quite often, you already have something that works quite well. Say you have an AI app that helps you with meeting notes, and then you notice that Notion provides a similar one. In that case, get your existing app to write up how it does its job. Pass that accumulated experience of your workflow on to Notion AI, just to see what it figures out that your existing tool cannot.

That could save you some time, because of two things I've learned about AI agents. First, they need onboarding, just like human workers, and often it is not even easier than for humans. Second, the main AI models are now good enough for most tasks. So the value a model brings depends on how you incorporate it into your existing system, more than on how many tokens it uses. The wrapper should enable the model rather than work against it, for example by throwing too much context at it.

Kept short on purpose,
Zhenia