“Filip, so how do you actually use AI?”
I get this question so often that I started keeping a list. It sat in my notes for a long time, and the summer holidays were the perfect excuse to turn it into a special. Here it is.
The starting point
I’ve always been the kind of person who has to be doing X things at once. Sometimes it’s an advantage, sometimes it isn’t, but that would be a different special. My main job is growing Good Sailors, on top of that I run innovation at M2C, I help out at the Innovation Centre of the Ústà Region, I write Zprávy z lesa and 11 Houses, I sit on the municipal council in Doubice, I’m a member of the Bohemian Switzerland National Park Council and a volunteer ranger. Plus mentoring at a couple of startup accelerators, and I’m always happy to sit on the jury of Křišťálová Lupa (the Czech internet awards), Nápad roku (Idea of the Year) or Firma roku (Company of the Year). Sometimes I give talks about entrepreneurship or about life in Greece - schools are probably my favourite audience. Seeing it all in one place does rather raise the question of whether it isn’t a bit much :-). But when you enjoy all of it… (note from my proofreader, also known as my wife: yes, it is too much!)
Today I genuinely can’t imagine doing all of this without using AI every single day. I’d either have to cut things out, or I’d already be as burnt out as the forest around Pravčická Brána (and after the 2022 wildfire here, that isn’t only a metaphor).
Where AI helps me and where it doesn’t
Pretty much everywhere - it sorts and answers email, it helps with strategy, with projects, with client proposals. The list of things where none of the tools gets involved anywhere in the process is very short. But it isn’t empty.
AI doesn’t help me choose the content for Zprávy z lesa, and it doesn’t help me choose the properties for 11 Houses. I’m not saying I haven’t tried. It just isn’t it. Even the presentations I put together I still mostly build by hand in Keynote, because the world is already drowning in decks made by Claude that the person presenting doesn’t actually understand.
It doesn’t help me with personal direction, with planning the important tasks and life priorities. And I think that’s going to matter more and more. AI will help you with the running of things, but you have to be the one holding the rudder. I’ll come back to that at the end.
The tools
Let me just list them so I don’t ramble on about the details. You want a list of tools and a list of use cases anyway…
* Claude - most of how I operate revolves around it. I have a pile of projects in there and I’ve connected it to everything I possibly can. We have the company version, so we share projects with colleagues. Some of them run tenders in it, some of them code in it.
* Perplexity - I use it because I get it free with my Revolut account. Unfortunately Revolut is now switching from Perplexity to ChatGPT, so my free ride is nearly over. I use it for everyday information lookup, basically instead of Google. Perplexity Computer isn’t a bad solution either, worth a try.
* ChatGPT - I’ve used it very little over the past year, mainly on the road thanks to their excellent voice interface, though lately it feels like it’s on the way back up. The voice mode really is superb. It can play couples’ therapist (no idea how well) or a game of word chain (not well at all). A great companion for topping up my brain on the drive to Prague - when I get bored of music and podcasts, I go and have a chat.
* Gemini - I have it as part of Google Workspace. I mostly use it for generating images and occasionally for transforming data, which it’s reasonably good at, but otherwise it’s miserable compared to Claude.
* Copilot - we have it at work, obviously. Once you’ve used Claude or Grokbot, Copilot feels like Siri or Clippy. It’s trying, but it’s practically useless. So I fire it up every now and then to confirm that it still “can’t do anything”. Anyone who claims otherwise hasn’t tried the alternatives, sorry.
* ElevenLabs - this is my voice. If you listen to Zprávy z lesa as a podcast, that voice isn’t mine, it’s ElevenLabs.
* Plaud - I have their pendant and use it together with the app to record calls and meetings. Lately I’ve stopped working with the meeting summaries and instead save the full transcripts, which I then work with in Claude. I’m gradually moving over to local Whisper, partly for security reasons.
* Lovable - my beloved tool (and European, at that!). I built my own website in it (design, copy, dark mode, translations into English and Greek…), some of our company sites, client prototypes, internal company apps, and 11 Risks came out of it in a single morning. I like it because whatever I build there I can point straight at a domain and it just runs. No hosting to sort out, no other faff.
* Grokbot - I’ve never used Grok, but Grokbot has been running for me for the last few days and I’m delighted. It’s Elon’s, so it’s a bit of a loose cannon, but the sheer amount it gets done is remarkable. It reaches out to partners for me, comments on content, and so far I’m happy with the results, so we’ll see. It isn’t cheap, but I have to say it made me go “wow” for the first time in a long while.
* A2E - for when I need to do something in graphics that the other models are too strict about. And I’m curious how long this will last, because how easily you can create harmful content there is frankly unbelievable. I’m not encouraging anything, but maybe try it, just so you know how easy it is to fabricate a photo of your wife with a lover. When somebody eventually sends you one, you might be a bit more careful about what you believe.
* Spark - an email client that lets me work with AI across all my accounts. It can answer email, sort it, or hand everything over to Claude.
* Second brain - a recurring topic. I stick to Apple’s native tools. Most of my content lives in Notes, and my “second brain” is an iCloud folder where I collect the most important material for each project and share it across tools. It’s a set of .md files with a basic project description, research results, downloaded data and other background worth having at hand as context for projects in different tools. For tasks I use Apple Reminders - though I’ll admit I’m still looking around here, and wondering whether to build something custom. Thanks to vibecoding, that’s finally realistic.
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How I actually use it
Morning podcast
Every morning Claude, working with the other tools, prepares a morning podcast for me. I play it on the way to work or while brushing my teeth. It’s a summary of what matters to me: local news, news from the tech world, and above all the distillation of my email, my calendar and Slack. What does it look like? Here’s a sample (names and projects are hidden or changed).
Thanks to its connection to Claude and other systems, Spark handles a lot of my email for me. I have both Google and Office 365 accounts connected. It works like this: every morning I already have draft replies waiting for the emails that need dealing with. In practice the rule of thirds applies. One third of the drafts are excellent and I just check them and send. One third are a decent base that needs something added. And one third are useless, so I delete them and write a different email. But the progress over the last few years is astonishing. The day when I won’t have to write email by hand is getting close.
Advisory board
We’ve built the dream advisory board for Good Sailors: Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Tomáš Baťa, Jeff Bezos, Yvon Chouinard and Jára Cimrman (the fictional Czech genius, playwright and all-round polymath - if you’re not Czech, just go with it). Cimrman was the tricky one, because the AI doesn’t know him well enough. I had to convert all his plays and lectures from audiobooks I’d bought into text and feed that into Claude. But it works brilliantly. The lads are even allowed to argue with each other during a session (looking at it now, we’ve got quite a gender balance problem there!).
Finance
I don’t like spreadsheets. I don’t like Excel. I don’t like dealing with money. My AI hack is to turn the spreadsheets that land in my inbox into nice clickable dashboards. I get charts, a decent little app, and a slightly greater appetite for looking at any of it.
Sales
Claude helps me enormously with sales. We have individual product projects in it, holding the information, the product documentation and the decks. Then all I have to say is “tomorrow we’re presenting to client XYZ, go through their annual reports and their website, and adapt the XYZ product deck so it fits”. Works a treat. Just don’t leave it entirely to the AI - verify the data and the deck before you open it in front of the client. AI is a brilliant assistant, but it needs your oversight and above all your judgement. It’s also excellent at going through all your LinkedIn connections and advising who to approach about what, and drafting the outreach on the spot. LinkedIn has no direct connection to AI tools, so you have to request an archive of your data in the settings and download it.
Due diligence and market research
One of the biggest savings is “research mode”. When something matters, I give the same prompt to all of them (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini), pull the results together and then start poking holes in them. I ask questions, I say what doesn’t add up and what smells off, and after about five rounds I’m happy with the output. Basic due diligence on companies or projects, market research. Here the AI tools do in a few hours what used to take weeks.
Gallup or Emiero
My favourite hack. I have my colleagues’ Gallup profiles loaded into the AI (Emiero, which is free, works fine too). The system then knows that when it’s preparing material for LĂda, she likes it terse and in a table, that Jindra wants the big picture and prefers a few slides, and that OndĹ™ej likes a long read with all the detail. Once your tools know this, they can serve up content in the form that will actually land.
Life in Greece
Here I genuinely can’t imagine it without AI. Translations, gathering information from the ground, keeping track of deadlines for various administrative obligations - I’m even slowly building myself a little app that watches all of it for me. I think that without today’s tools we still wouldn’t have the house and would still be untangling some legal detail. And every Sunday Claude generates a newspaper for me with everything important happening in our village down there.
Time analysis and productivity
Once a month I do an exercise where I check whether I’m giving my time to the right things. It sounds simple, but with this many activities it isn’t. Am I giving enough attention to the highest priorities? Do I have any time left for what I actually want to do? Claude goes through my calendar entries for the past month, adds my email and my Slack activity, and builds me a beautiful dashboard. It’s always a great thing to look back on. It gets even more interesting when you add sleep and stress data. It shows you very clearly what drains you and what gives you energy (better done on local models, see below).
Are you eating well?
Another favourite exercise is to occasionally give it access to my RohlĂk account (our online grocery delivery) and have it analyse how healthily I eat. Or compare RohlĂk’s prices with prices in Germany, which is just down the road from us. It doesn’t have to be RohlĂk - just keep your receipts for the last month and upload those.
Local: safer and more sustainable
I use local models and tools for a whole range of things. Partly for security (mainly personal and health data) and partly for sustainability. Why burn energy in a data centre on things a local model can handle, and handle “for free”? What do I use?
* LM Studio & Bionic - the main tool. Thanks to decent hardware I’m able to run very good models locally.
* Ollama - similar, a more user-friendly option for less technical people.
* Hermes Agent - a very interesting solution, I’ve been playing with it for several months.
* Whisper - as above, audio-to-text transcription locally, so sensitive meetings never go near the cloud.
Personally I think local LLMs are the future for most everyday things, and cloud solutions will remain only for the most demanding tasks.
Running local models does require the hardware to match. I run the smaller models on a laptop (M4 Max, 36 GB), the larger ones on a Mac Studio (M1 Ultra, 128 GB).
This is only a handful of things, and there are far more use cases, especially work ones. Digging manually through the papers for a council meeting or the National Park Council is something I’d never go back to. For the company acquisitions I handle at M2C, it’s like having a small team beside me. And what we do in development at Good Sailors would fill several specials on its own. And as I wrote above, it looks like Grokbot might shake all of this up properly, because it isn’t about individual activities any more, it’s about a team of agents that can genuinely take care of specific jobs. I’ll probably write about that separately once I’ve lived with it longer…
And finally: switch it all off and go offline
One last small note. The more I use AI to make life more efficient, the more I realise how important it is to “hold the rudder” - and, while holding it, to be disconnected from every tool. I have a feeling that if we can’t build our own path through life and define our key priorities and direction, we’ll end up living according to language models. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I prefer to keep it in my own hands.
So for my own direction, the classic route: notebook, pencil, devices off, and write down the 10 things you’d want to do if you found out you had a week to live. Then the 100 things you’d want to do if you only had a year. Knowing what genuinely matters to us is going to get more and more important (and harder) with all that outside intelligence around us - but more on that another time…
What about you? Any interesting hacks or unusual use cases? Bring them on! 🙏
