What do you hate doing?

Every quarter or so I take a day to get caught up on whatever is going on with past or current clients. It’s a manual process involving lots of google searches, LinkedIn scouring and checking on company websites. I use a spreadsheet to keep track of this stuff.

After that, I go through each one to see which might warrant a check in or if there's something I can send their way - an article, a podcast or something related to what I've discovered.

This has always been a time consuming process - between a half day and a day. It's worth it because it keeps me from missing opportunities to check in and gives me something to ask about when I do.

This is the kind of thing I'd probably delegate to a team member, but I operate pretty lean, so I do it myself. Over the past year, AI has become less of a tool and more of a co-worker. I delegate many research tasks like this to that co-worker.

I don't trust it yet for things like summarization. It's OK, but requires a lot of oversight. I don't use it to write for me either, but for a different reason. I enjoy writing, even emails, believe it or not. Research? Not so much. I'm happy to outsource that. I take no joy in the hunt, sifting through search results and clickbait sites. Research to me is a lot like shopping for clothes. I don't enjoy searching for sales or thumbing through clothing racks to find what I'm looking for. I just want to tell someone what I want and have them go find it for me.

Thanks to my AI coworker, my client research now looks like this:

1. I provide a list of clients

2. I enter a prompt like: "Find information about any recent product launches, earnings releases, hiring, layoffs or anything else that represents a change in what the organization might be focused on. Focus mainly on the last 3 months. Update [this spreadsheet] the new information."

3. I read through that list to make sure it's researched the right companies. Sometimes it gets the name wrong and gives me info on a company with a similar name.

4. Once it’s right, I enter this prompt: "Based on what you know about my work and my relationships with these clients, prioritize this list to help me know which ones I should reach out to first." (I've spent some time educating it on what I do and it's reached a decent enough understanding at this point to do this task.) It reshuffles the list and I take over from there.

As an experiment, I have asked it to write the emails for me, but it does a pretty bad job with that task. As much as I try to help with more direction, the emails never sound like me and always come off like mad libs style AI generated emails.

That’s ok since I have no interest in having it write for me. I was just curious.

By outsourcing the research part, something I really hate doing, I’m saving a ton of time and getting lots of value.

The majority of other use cases for me fall into the category of DIY customer service, something else I hate dealing with. My experiences with most companies' online customer service is frustrating. Few have trained their own AI with enough data to help with anything but the most basic use cases.

Now I can delegate that problem to my AI. After a few short prompts it goes on a 3 second excursion around the internet, traveling through third party blogs, customer reviews, FAQ's and whatever else it can find. Before I can begin to multi-task, I have the steps to solve my problem.

I'm enjoying these moments where I pick a really frustrating problem or thing I hate doing. I put AI to the test and see if it does the job better than how I was dealing with it. If it is better, great! If not, I'll look for other ways to modify what I'm already doing.

The secret to unlocking AI value is to start with problems, but that alone doesn't cut it. If someone doesn’t care about a problem, they won’t care about solving it. If they care about the problem and hate that they have to deal with it, they are highly motivated to find an alternative.

I know that works on a personal level and I believe it works at an organizational level. If you are a leader, just try it. Instead of telling people to "use AI to be more efficient", tell them to start by finding all the things they hate doing. I'm willing to bet that AI adoption rates will be far greater.

So, what things do you hate doing?