Part 1 · Know Your AI Readiness
Value · Finding Your AI Use Cases
The Ethics lessons taught you to check what AI gives back. Now open last week's calendar. Some of those tasks AI could not touch. Others it could have halved, if only you had spotted them.
Which of your tasks is an AI task?
Most advice tells you to use AI more. That is the wrong instruction. The real skill is knowing which of your tasks are worth pointing it at. AI is a production engine: it drafts, summarises, reformats, and spots patterns at almost no cost. What it cannot do is decide what matters, weigh a trade-off, or own the outcome. That part stays yours.
So how do you spot a task where AI helps? Ask three questions of it. Is it repetitive and pattern-shaped, something you do often, in a similar form? Can you verify the output quickly and catch a mistake? And does it hand you a draft rather than make the decision? A task that passes all three is a strong candidate.
- Repetitive or pattern-shaped: you do it often, in a similar form each time.
- Quick to verify: you can check the output and catch a mistake fast.
- A draft you check: AI produces it; you judge it and own the result.
Take turning a week of messy meeting notes into a clean action list. It repeats. You can check it at a glance. And you still edit the draft. That is a strong candidate. Now take deciding which supplier to sign. The stakes are high. A wrong call is hard to verify, and the judgement is yours. Keep that one human. Your two or three best use cases live in the first group.
Scanning your own work
When you scan your own work, watch for two traps. The first is over-trusting AI on the judgement calls (the sign-offs and decisions) where a confident wrong answer costs you the most. The second is more common: forgetting AI entirely on the dull, high-volume tasks where it saves the most and risks the least. Most people aim too high and miss the easy wins under their nose.
One habit from day one: never paste confidential or personal data into a public AI tool. Prove a use case on something you could show a stranger. If it only works with sensitive data, reach for an approved tool rather than a public one.
Key Takeaway
Your two or three best use cases are repetitive, quick to verify, and hand you a draft rather than a decision.
Check your understanding
Self-check only. Nothing is scored and nothing is recorded; open an answer to compare it with your own.
Which of these is the strongest first AI use case for someone trying to get value quickly and safely?
- Letting AI make the final call on which supplier to award a major contract.
- Drafting the weekly status summary you write every Friday from the same set of updates.
- A one-off, highly sensitive task you will never do again.
- Whatever the most advanced AI feature happens to be this month.
Show the answer
Drafting the weekly status summary you write every Friday from the same set of updates.
A manager says, "I am sure AI could help us loads, we just have not really looked at where." Where do they sit, and what is the AI-Ready move?
- AI Ready, recognising AI could help is the key insight.
- Below AI Ready; the AI-Ready move is to name two or three specific, routine tasks where AI could genuinely help.
- Above AI Ready, keeping an open mind about AI's potential is the advanced stance.
- It does not matter where they start, as long as the ambition is big enough.
Show the answer
Below AI Ready; the AI-Ready move is to name two or three specific, routine tasks where AI could genuinely help.
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