If you have enjoyed my articles on Home Automation, I invite you to join my AI Column where I post bi-weekly content to raise everyone’s AI IQ. Below is the intro article. Subscribe for updates at Substack.
AI, Going Up?
A Column About AI — For All of Us
Artificial intelligence is no longer a technology story. It is a business story, a workplace story, a family story, and increasingly a daily-life story for anyone navigating the modern world. It is reshaping industries, rewriting job descriptions, and quietly changing the way decisions get made at every level, from the boardroom to the kitchen table. And yet for most people going about their lives, running a business, managing a team, raising a family, or simply trying to stay on top of an inbox that never empties, the whole thing still feels a bit out of reach, like something happening somewhere else, to someone more technical, more plugged-in, or with more hours in the day than they have.
This column is here to change that.
Each installment, I will take one corner of the AI world: one tool, one technique, one useful application, and make it accessible to anyone willing to spend a few minutes reading. Not the hype. Not the breathless predictions about what machines will do to humanity in fifty years. The practical, real-world stuff that is available right now and that actual people are using to make their lives a little easier, their work a little better, and their time a little more their own. I will take ideas from my personal and professional life and invite you to make suggestions.
A fair warning: anyone who claims to have AI completely figured out is either misinformed or trying to sell you something. This space moves extraordinarily fast, and genuine humility is the only honest posture to take. I’m learning alongside you.
The Moment Everything Changed
If you want to understand where we are today, it helps to remember where this started for most people. In November of 2022, OpenAI released a tool called ChatGPT. What happened next was unlike anything the technology world had seen in years. Within two months it had one hundred million users — a record that had taken Instagram two and a half years and TikTok nine months to reach. People were not just curious. They were genuinely astonished. You could type a question in plain English and receive a thoughtful, articulate, human-sounding answer in seconds. For a few weeks it was nearly impossible to open a newspaper or sit through a meeting without someone bringing it up.
That moment mattered enormously. It cracked the door open for millions of people who might otherwise have never engaged with AI at all. Teachers experimented with it. Small business owners tried it. Parents used it to explain homework problems. Executives asked it to summarize documents. It was the first time the technology felt genuinely within reach for ordinary people, and that is no small thing.
The problem is that for most of those people, the door never opened much wider. The initial wonder wore off, a routine settled in, and that routine looked a lot like this: type a question, read the answer, move on. Which is to say, most people started using AI the same way they had always used Google.
The Lobby Problem
There is nothing wrong with using AI to look things up or to improve your writing. I used it for this article. It is often faster than a search engine and considerably better at synthesizing information into a coherent answer. But here is the honest truth: using AI as a slightly smarter search engine is the floor of what it can do. It is the lobby of a skyscraper. Millions of people grabbed a quick answer from the front desk and walked back outside without ever finding the elevator.
The floors above the lobby are where AI stops being a reference tool and starts being something closer to a collaborator, or even an employee. It can help you think through a difficult decision, draft communications that actually sound like you, organize and act on information spread across your life, and handle the kind of time-consuming mental labor that accumulates quietly until it is consuming your entire afternoon. The technology that does these things is available right now, costs roughly the same as a streaming subscription, and requires no technical background to use well.
It just requires someone to show you the elevator.
What This Column Is, and What It Is Not
Every other week, I will take one specific use case, practical and grounded, chosen because real people are finding it valuable, and walk through it in enough detail that you can actually try it. I will cover things like setting up a personal AI workspace that remembers who you are and what you do, connecting your AI tools directly to the apps you already live in: your email, your calendar, your Microsoft 365 suite, and building simple automations that handle the repetitive work you have been doing manually for years. I will look at ready-made skills that give your AI instant expertise in specific tasks, plugins that bridge the gap between AI and the software your business runs on, and tools that let non-technical people automate their desktop and files without writing a line of code. Some of it will lean personal. Most of it will have immediate professional applications. All of it will be written for people with actual lives and limited patience for technology that exists purely to impress.
What this column is not: a product review site, a place for predictions about what AI will do in twenty years, or a forum for debating whether any of this is good for humanity. Those are legitimate conversations happening in other places. My focus is narrower and, I’d argue, more immediately useful. I want you to open your laptop on a Tuesday afternoon, spend twenty minutes on something that used to take two hours, and then wonder why nobody showed you this sooner.
One more thing before I close this first installment. The readers who will get the most from this column are not necessarily the most tech-savvy. They are the ones willing to try something once, give it a fair shot with real tasks rather than test questions, and stick with it long enough to move past the lobby. Curiosity, not technical skill, is the only qualification required.
Next Up: Finding the Elevator
The next installment will get specific. I will walk through exactly where to start, which tool I recommend and why, and most importantly, a feature that transforms AI from a search engine into something that actually knows who you are and what you are trying to accomplish. I will include real examples you can follow along with, and at least one thing you can set up in under fifteen minutes that will immediately change how you approach a recurring task in your week.
ChatGPT showed the world the lobby. I’m here to help you take the elevator up.
See you in two weeks.
Dov Pavel
