AI tools freed them from using AI tools

Weird title, I know.

But for the past three years, I’ve been claiming:

When you put in the work up front to delegate your busy work to AI effectively, you free up time for the high-value, knowledge-intensive work which, paradoxically, tends not to mesh as well with AI.

And now that enough time has passed, I’m seeing this play out in real teams, not just theory:

1. PR managers at two multinational companies use AI to co-create all their campaign collateral. One said a new product news release now takes 10 hours instead of 35. Both are using that “extra” time for smarter, more personalized media outreach.
2. The lead communicator at a small nonprofit trained ChatGPT to:
   • Write a regular, specific type of blog post/eblast
   • Write an advice column in their monthly newsletter
   • Analyze hundreds of grant applications

     The training wasn’t a long slog – about an hour each. She gathered good examples of each output, fed them to the bot, and had it draft its own instructions. And it should go without saying that every piece gets human review before going public.

     That freed her to invest in relationship-building emails to podcasters and traditional journalists in her space. Because each email needs to be different and highly personalized, she finds herself doing these mostly on her own, using AI only for research.

3. A university communicator created different CustomGPTs that:
   • Write different types of news releases, including theater productions, concerts, academic lectures, and awards
   • Generate prep documents for a weekly local-radio interview with a university guest
   • Write newsletter articles

     With the bandwidth he created, he’s tackled crisis comms prep, something we usually kick down the road until the fire starts. And he initiated a project to create short video companions to news releases, testing whether engagement improves, one of those “someday” ideas that usually stays on the backburner.

So hopefully my weird title makes more sense.

These pros use AI for repeatable tasks where “good enough” is good enough. And they’re leaning into projects that instead require more of their human qualities.

In other words, the better you get at using AI, the less you need it.

Because what’s left is work that fully engages you, work that’s meaningful and aligned with your gifts and expertise, because YOU’RE the best asset for accomplishing those projects.

P.S. I detailed the examples above, including the prompts and chats these pros used, in a training for Inner Circle members. If you’d like to be alerted the next time we open enrollment, register for our Wait List.