How can you use AI to disrupt your own job?

If you are in a white-collar or creative job, you can’t go even an hour without hearing, reading or seeing something about AI. This can be exhilarating, intimidating or even exhausting. However, there’s no getting around the fact that avoiding AI won’t get it done. And if you think using ChatGPT or Perplexity is all you need, you are probably mistaken.?

When the pace of change outside is faster than the rate of change inside, know that the end is near.

It doesn’t matter what your job is — so long as there’s a creative and repetitive component — AI is already there to help or soon will be. The best strategy for any creative professional is to leverage AI as best as possible. Here’s a simple approach to try and do so. Take an hour on a weekend and write down “the typical day” in your personal and work life. Write down all the tasks that take much time (repetitive) in nature or activities that require a lot of cognitive effort (creative).

As an early-stage investor, I spend much time finding and meeting founders of innovative new companies, attending meetings of different natures (board meetings, internal meetings, research meetings, etc), interviewing people and collaborating with others in the startup ecosystem. Once you write down all the tasks and areas of potential help, search for AI tools or even ask other people with similar needs or task profiles what they have explored or, better yet, adopted. Once you find a few such tools, start ‘playing around’ or ‘tinkering’.?Some will make sense, and some won’t. Not only will it help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your job, but it will also help you as a leader in your organization, encouraging others to do the same.?

Here are three recent examples of tasks/areas in which I have tried to leverage AI:

Interviewing candidates: Our portfolio companies often call upon us to interview candidates for leadership roles. To prepare for an interview, one would typically go through the candidates profile, ask the hiring company for what they’d like to evaluate the candidate for, use your approach (I like behavioral, open ended interviews and have documented it), run the interview, and then write up a final recommendation with your reasons why. As I hope you can immediately see, AI is a godsend for this. I have done all interviews over the two months using this framework, which has helped me tremendously. The tools I have used are ChatGPT, Granola, and Claude.

What am I still looking for? An AI tool to do prior research on the candidates, compare that candidate to others (assuming I have interviewed others for the same role), and help me stay on course during the interview process!

I attend many board meetings.?The best meetings always start with what we discussed last time, what got done, what didn’t and why. Further, you have longitudinal data on each company. For example, we get mostly MISs for most companies, email discussions over time, and board decks about the company over months and quarters. I will often put all of the board decks, meeting minutes, and some select notes about the company before the meeting to prepare for it. I use ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini for these activities, and they both do a fabulous job helping me prepare better.

What am I still looking for? I’d love to point augment all of this ‘internal’ facing work on the company to external content relevant to the company - news, competitive landscape, their social media presence, our private WhatsApp chatter (we have groups for each company), employee surveys or feedback (think, Glassdoor ratings) and see if there’s any ‘signal’ about the company or its industry that’s worth understanding.?

Lastly, here’s an example that I’m keen to do but looking to help from all of you! We get many emails, WhatsApp messages (private) and other action items from many people. Prioritizing and following up are both critical. I am looking for AI tools or agents to semi-automate this across email, WhatsApp, meeting minutes, etc so that I can get an automated and prioritized task list to follow up on every day! This problem gets even more complicated (or interesting) if you combine your personal and professional lives.?

3M, one of the more innovative companies, used to have a maxim that you need to get 25% of your revenue from new products introduced in the last 3-5 years.?We can steal that idea for ourselves — we should have 25% of our jobs using AI in the next 12 months!?

As Darwin said, it is not the fastest or the strongest of the species that will survive but the ones that are most adaptable to change!

(Amit is a Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, an early-stage Venture Capital firm based in Bangalore, India. Prime VP invests in category-creating, early-stage companies founded by rock star teams. We have invested in companies like MyGate, NiYo, Sunstone, Quizizz, PlanetSpark, Dozee, Poshn and more.

Prior, Amit held leadership positions in Product and Engineering at Makemytrip, Google, and IBM in India and the US. Find my other blogs on LinkedIn & my tweets at @amitsomani)