Here is how I am using AI right now at work, at home, and for my finances...
Every founder, executive or investor I talk with these days wants to know how others are using AI in their daily lives. I figured it would be helpful to pull back the curtain on what I am using and how I have implemented the various products.
There are three areas where I have adopted AI in a material way: professionally, financially, and personally.
Professional use of AI
On the professional side, I am currently using Grok @bot extensively. I started with a Chief of Staff bot that I put in charge of the entire operation, followed by a number of more specialized bots for various bodies of work (talent recruiter, product designer, podcast researcher, book launch manager, email organizer, etc). Once I had the initial team of bots set up, I spent about an hour “onboarding” the Chief of Staff to my professional life.
I treated this exactly how I would onboard a human Chief of Staff. I explained each business I am involved with, including their products, business model, personnel, metrics, and goals. I explicitly called out what the business is doing well and where we need to improve. I also gave the Chief of Staff access to relevant systems (email, calendar, Slack, analytics dashboards, etc).
Once I had given as much context as I thought necessary, I asked the Chief of Staff to create an overview document to send me so I could double-check the accuracy and thoroughness of the bots understanding. I also asked the CoS bot to interview me for any other information that would be relevant to ensuring the bot could help me.
This entire process was fairly quick and painless, but I believe it was the single most important thing I did to get value from Grok Bot. The more context that the AI system has, the more helpful it can be. That context can come from static, institutional knowledge or it can come from dynamic daily updates like email and Slack messages.
After getting the bots set up and giving them context, I have done two other things that I think are worth sharing. The first is that my team of bots holds a daily standup meeting where they all come together and share what they did yesterday, what they are going to do today, and what they need my help or approval on (aka what they are blocked on). These “exec meeting” or daily standup allows for the bots to collaborate in a more seamless way, while also creating a very simple process for the Chief of Staff bot to put together a daily brief for me on what happened yesterday, what is going to happen today, and where I am needed to unblock productivity.
The second thing I have done is treat the AI system as the brain of the company. Most people try to use AI as an augmentation to themselves, which can be helpful to a degree. I have flipped the relationship though. I look at my job as persistently giving the AI bots as much context as possible, so I can leverage their superhuman intelligence to make decisions and achieve our goals.
For example, the recruiter bot recently surfaced a number of very high-quality candidates for an open role we have. After meeting with each candidate, I wrote a quick message to the recruiter bot to tell it what I liked about the person, what I thought were potential issues, improvements for future searches, and what the next steps were with each individual.
All of that information and context is getting stored in the bot’s memory, which will compound over time and help us improve as an organization. Quick pro tip: If you are worried about putting all of the context into a single system’s memory, but unsure if that is the system you will use forever, you can have Grok Bot or another system dump their memory and context into a Notion document as well. This way you have a duplicate copy of the memory so it can be referenced by any AI system you use in the future.
My takeaway from using Grok Bot to manage our companies is that we are having to hire less people, we are seeing a direct impact on revenue growth, and it appears to drive higher quality in our decision-making process. That is a win-win-win. I highly recommend going through these steps to setup your system correctly and it will pay off big time later on.
Financial use of AI
On the financial side, it was nearly impossible to find a good AI product to use for personal finance. Everything seemed to be a Chat-GPT wrapper that technically worked from an engineering standpoint, but didn’t solve any of the user problems I was facing. A big issue is that most of the fintech products are focused on budgeting and saving, rather than investing and growing your portfolio.
This is why I eventually spent the time and money to build CFO Silvia. I went through a similar process of getting Silvia set up with the necessary context. I attached my bank accounts, brokerage accounts, crypto accounts, and credit cards, along with uploading real estate, cars, collectibles, and private investments. Silvia allows me to dynamically track the value of these assets (and my overall net worth) in real-time.
But the real unlock for me has been talking to Silvia about two specific topics: tax and estate planning.
As most of you know, I am not a frequent trader, so although you could use Silvia for stock analysis or trading activities, that is not my approach to investing. Instead, I have had great success in using Silvia to find creative and valuable tax mitigation strategies that are personalized to my situation, including ideas that had not previously been surfaced by my accountants, lawyers, or tax experts.
Additionally, I have used Silvia for estate planning purposes. I am married and have four children, so there is a decent amount of complexity and opportunities to pursue. Having a dedicated resource with superhuman intelligence and the full context of my personal financial situation has been incredibly powerful. One funny thing I have noticed is that I am willing to tell Silvia certain things that I would hesitate to tell other humans (financial goals, areas of concern, etc) and I ask numerous “dumb” questions that I would probably shy away from asking a human.
Regardless of why I feel more comfortable talking to the AI product, it has unlocked a few different ideas and strategies that I was previously unaware of, so that has been an added bonus to using the product. If you aren’t using AI to help manage your finances, I think it is a no brainer to start using the technology. I am biased towards Silvia since we built it, but you can give it a try for free here: t.co/bMI7hLeciU
Personal use of AI
On the personal side, I use almost all of the traditional AI products (Chat-GPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity, etc). Those are well understood at this point, but one product that I started using recently that I am impressed with is Instinct AI.
They have built a personal assistant AI bot that you communicate with through iMessage or SMS. The experience has been delightful, but I am most excited about the bot’s ability to anticipate the second or third-step in a process before I have to tell it anything.
For example, Instinct got access to my calendar and immediately started identifying scheduling conflicts and asked me if I would like the bot to reach out to one of the parties to reschedule. I never told it to look for conflicts, nor did I tell it I wanted help rescheduling things. It’s “instincts” knew what the basic task would be and began executing.
Another example is that Instinct was told my wife is Polina, so whenever it deems something important to the household or family, Instinct will add Polina to the calendar invite, communicate the information to her, or ask me if Polina should be aware of the information. This is very helpful for someone like me who has too many things floating around in my brain and should always do a better job of keeping Polina informed about various things.
Lastly, Instinct is very helpful in scanning my personal email and understanding what is most important. It ignores things that are trivial, but somehow can parse out the high priority items, summarize them for me in a text message, draft a response to the email, and then ask me for permission to respond. As I said, it is the most impressive personal assistant AI product I have used so far.
So those are the three big areas that I use AI today and the specific products I have incorporated into my life. Before I let you go, I figured I could share some best practices I have learned as well. I also make sure to tell AI bots they are not allowed to respond to any message or email without my explicit approval. This reduces the risk of having a bot go rogue with a message or commitment that I am not onboard with.
I also ensure that each bot only has read access to our business systems like an analytics dashboard, etc. While I am a big proponent of using these products and believe they will fundamentally transform how we operate professionally, I am still not ready to let them loose without human oversight. I am sure that will change in the coming weeks and months, but I need more time to get comfortable with that level of delegation and trust.
I hope this overview was helpful for each of you. It would be great if you could respond to this post with any products you are using or tips/tricks that you have learned to get more productivity and value in your life. I love writing these letters each day because I learn just as much from me as I learn from you all.
Onwards!
