You Are Not Behind on AI

I keep hearing the same thing from people: “I feel like I’m already behind on AI.” And I get it. Every day there’s a new model, a new tool, a new feature, and a new person on LinkedIn explaining how they automated their entire life. It can make you feel like everyone else got a head start and somehow you missed the memo. But here’s the thing: you are probably not behind at all. In fact, most people are still figuring this out.

There’s a big difference between hearing about AI and actually knowing how to use it in your everyday work. A lot of people have opened ChatGPT or Claude. They’ve asked it to rewrite an email, summarize a document, or give them dinner ideas. That doesn’t mean they’ve completely transformed the way they work. And that’s where I think people are getting AI wrong.

You Don't Need to Know Everything

I work in operations, so my brain naturally looks at things and thinks: Why are we doing it this way? Why does this take so long? Why are we manually doing something a computer could probably do for us? AI became interesting to me because it gave me another way to solve those problems. Not because I wanted to become an AI expert, and definitely not because I wanted another piece of technology to keep up with. I wanted to get things done faster and better. Also, I like to geek out a little bit.

That is still how I think most people should approach AI. You don't need to understand everything happening in the AI world. You need to understand enough to recognize the moments where it can help you.

The Real Skill Is Knowing What to Ask

People sometimes think being “good at AI” means knowing the perfect prompt. I don’t really believe that. The bigger skill is being able to look at your work and say: There has to be a better way to do this. Just keep probing and probing until you feel you’ve exhausted all the questions in your brain.

Maybe you spend three hours every Monday putting together the same report. Maybe you’re constantly writing versions of the same customer email. Maybe you have 5,000 rows of data and don’t know where to start. Maybe you have an idea for a tool but have absolutely no idea how to code it. Maybe you need to write SQL, build an Excel formula, create a VBA macro, analyze customer feedback, document a process, prepare for a meeting, or turn a messy thought into an actual plan. I sure as hell am not going to learn SQL from scratch with how busy my life is today.

AI is not really about sitting down and saying, What should I use AI for today? It’s about going through your normal day and starting to notice: Wait. Could AI help me with this? That’s how you build up your process.

You Don't Need to Be Technical

This is probably the biggest misconception. Some of the most useful things I have done with AI are things I would have previously assumed required someone much more technical than me. That doesn’t mean I suddenly became a software engineer. (I wish!) It means the barrier between having an idea and actually building something has gotten significantly smaller.

You can describe what you are trying to accomplish. You can ask questions. You can tell it when something doesn’t work. You can keep refining it. That process feels much more like working with another person than learning traditional software. Also, AI never gets mad or annoyed at you for asking multiple questions in a row (Unless you somehow programmed your AI to be a little sassy). And that is why I think this technology is going to be so important. It gives people who understand the business problem a much bigger ability to solve the business problem themselves.

Start With the Annoying Stuff

If you want to get better at AI, don't start by trying to learn AI. Start by looking at the things that annoy you: the spreadsheet you hate updating, the report that takes forever, the meeting you always have to prepare for, the process nobody understands, the emails you rewrite 15 times, the information scattered across five different documents, or the task that makes you think: There has to be an easier way. At the very least, please don’t take meeting notes anymore…You’re not a secretary or a scribe.

Take one of those things and start there. Ask AI how it would approach it. Give it context. Show it examples. Tell it what you like and what you don't like. Make it explain things when you don't understand. Keep going. That's how you actually learn.

You Are Not Too Late

The people who will be ahead aren't necessarily the people who started first. They will be the people who get comfortable experimenting, asking questions that feel stupid, trying something, getting a bad answer, and trying again. They will be the people who stop treating AI like a search engine and start treating it like a tool they can actually work with.

You don’t need to catch up on the last three years of AI news. You don't need to use every tool. You don't need to become the AI person in your company. You just need to start building the habit of asking: Could there be a better way to do this?

Because there probably is. And you are absolutely not too late to figure it out.