I help small and medium businesses in professional services, consulting, and expertise-heavy work find the tasks that are stealing their team's time, then build the AI tools that give it back. Recent results: 92% cost reduction, 12x capacity, €55k/month recovered.
⚡ AI as my strategist, researcher, and tech lead? Here’s what actually happened today
An Honest Look at My AI-Powered WorkdayMany people think of AI as a simple chatbot - but I get more done by managing it like a cross-functional team. Today, it became my strategist, researcher, and tech lead (simultaneously). Background: As a self-employed consultant juggling multiple business functions, I've been wondering just how much my productivity has truly improved with AI. I've also been sharing some productivity gains in recent posts, and many of you have asked questions about my approach. So I decided to document everything I accomplished in a single day. The exercise was partly for my own clarity - to see if I'm genuinely being more productive or just feeling busy - and partly to understand how I'm actually using these tools in practice to answer your questions. I tracked everything I did today, both with and without AI assistance, and the results were eye-opening. In a single day, with AI assistance for the vast majority of tasks, I accomplished work across multiple categories: Content Strategy & Social 🔍 Developed a very detailed internal LinkedIn strategy after analysing 365 and 90 days of post analytics Business Development & Research 📊 Analysed 3 competitors' e-learning courses for insights (I'm planning my "AI Accelerator" series) Technical Implementation 🤖 Built, deployed, and tested an AI chatbot on Vercel (a cloud computing site) All while having ~10 different AI conversations running simultaneously. And by the way, that work was GOOD, not shody AI rubbish. As an example, the LinkedIn strategy is solid, and detailed, and highly customised for me and this business: It's 6,000 words in total and includes strategy, and implementation (e.g. checklists + examples). The clear upsidesThe sheer volume of work I completed and ideas generated in a single day would have been impossible before. AI has become my thinking partner, research assistant, and implementation aide all at once. As an independent consultant wearing multiple hats, I’m genuinely more productive across all the different areas my business requires attention. Rather than just a helper following instructions, I’ve found treating AI as a distributed team - with different conversations handling different specialised roles - dramatically multiplies what I can accomplish. The quality hasn’t suffered either—in many cases, this approach helps me think through problems more thoroughly and consider angles I might have overlooked. The honest challengesWhile I’m confident I’m being more productive, managing this “multi-threaded” approach requires intention. With a lot of AI conversations running simultaneously, there’s a very real risk of starting more than I can properly finish. The cognitive switching between different domains is smoother with AI assistance, but still requires mental bandwidth. (And if you don't like having a lot of tabs open, my web browser today would have terrified you.) There’s something both exhilarating and occasionally overwhelming about how quickly I can now move from idea to execution across multiple domains simultaneously. What I’m learning:
I’m still optimising my workflow, but I’ve never been more productive or had more business opportunities in development simultaneously. What about you? Has AI dramatically changed your workday? How are you managing the expanded capacity it offers? And what systems have you found helpful for organising all the possibilities it creates? Hit reply - I'd love to hear about how it's working (or not working) for you! And if you need help, I'd be happy to chat. Alastair. “If your opinion on AI can fit on a bumper sticker, you’re probably wrong”
📈 AI Success Story 90% reduction in data entry time
🧠 Free Resources The Complete AI Toolkit includes:
|
Hi, I'm Alastair
I help small and medium businesses in professional services, consulting, and expertise-heavy work find the tasks that are stealing their team's time, then build the AI tools that give it back. Recent results: 92% cost reduction, 12x capacity, €55k/month recovered.
You just made a critical business decision in 30 seconds that took your competitor two weeks to figure out. That instinctive call you made? The one that saved your client thousands and earned their trust? It came from two decades of hard-won experience. But right now, it lives only in your head - impossible to scale, teach, or even fully explain to your clients or team. What if you could extract that expertise and turn it into a repeatable, sellable framework in just 90 minutes? For the past...
Over the past couple of years working with businesses implementing AI, I'm seeing a growing gap that will become harder to bridge over time. On one side businesses are taking imperfect action to implement AI today. They're fully aware that AI is not perfect. They're not making wild bets or believing in AI hype. They're simply: identifying specific operational bottlenecks where AI can remove friction, and building systems that help their people deliver value. On the other side are businesses...
Creating a new training course module can be a long process - from brainstorming concepts to developing a structured outline - and that's before you even record the video! To create a high quality outline, the planning section often requires hours of an expert's time. But what if you could create a detailed outline - and a good one at that - for a complete training module in under an hour? That’s what we achieved when I partnered with a training consultant to use AI in enhancing her...