|
This is the first of four emails about how I actually use AI in my business: the tools, the experiments, what’s earning its keep, and what’s been a waste of money. The idea comes from Claire Vo’s podcast How I AI, where guests walk through the real workflows behind their work. It's great, but most of the guests are software people. My version is for the rest of us: operators, owners, and project leaders at manufacturers, distributors, and service companies. So this is Andrea’s version. If you feel mixed about AI right now, you’re in good company. In a recent NBC News poll, more voters felt negatively about AI than positively, and in a Fox News poll a slim majority said it hasn’t made much difference in their lives at all. Meanwhile, Gallup says more than half of U.S. employees now use it at work. Both things are true in my business, too. I’m not here to convince you of anything. I’m just going to show you what I use. What’s on my AI billHere’s every tool I’m paying for or testing, what I use it for, and what I’d tell a friend before they signed up.
|
What I use it for: Meeting notes and summaries for every client and sales call. Our whole team uses it now, which means nobody is typing notes while they should be listening. Also, I try to summarize what I'm hearing from prospective customers, and Fathom catches all of it, which really helps when I write the context part of proposals.
Good: Catches everything said, more thoroughly than human hand-written notes (and my handwriting is bad); I focus on the conversation and when I write notes now, they are on ideas I want to bring up later in the conversation.
Watch out: Fathom does not yet work on iPhones; even my Teams or Zoom app won't bring it in, and it cannot be added to phone calls yet (I'm totally fine with it giving a recorded disclaimer), nor does it have an in-person app to use for recordings - so I'm still manually taking notes in phone calls and if I record an in-person meeting on my iPhone's voice memo app, I have to transcribe it to my computer, versus having it all in one place (i.e. in Fathom).
|
|
What I use it for: Business collateral, drafting and pressure-testing documents, and building the tools you’ll see in Part 2. Our consultants use it to streamline their deliverables. I'm a HUGE fan of Claude Code and use it daily. Also, since we have an Enterprise version now, it is connected to my OneDrive and my SharePoint and can search for and find files we have saved that I may have even forgotten about.
Good: It creates code for me to copy/paste into my website; it will take images, hand-written notes, spreadsheets, documents, screen captures, etc. It creates professionally formatted PowerPoint decks that I can edit in the tool or download and edit. It augments my impatience and visual nature by offering tangible materials I can adjust in a very short amount of time.
Watch out: I max out on the plan we are on, and sometimes have to wait for my usage "tokens" to refresh. This is fine as I'm a spotty user, but it would be great if it could store up what I pay so that when I do have a full day to be heads down, I can use what I did not use on days that I have so many meetings I barely get into it. Also, it does hallucinate - like every other model, you have to read what it puts together and make manual adjustments. I haven't figured out how to use the "paintbrush" editor in the browser version. It doesn't yet have a marketplace, and I code web tools that I want my users to benefit from AI suggestions for, but they'd have to import my HTML into THEIR Claude, and that's not happening - would love to productize within Claude. I'm sure that's coming.
|
|
What I use it for: I use Chat mostly for personal things now: as a thought partner, for writing content, and personal needs in the moment. For example, I took pictures of seven pairs of black shoes my son was considering for school and it researched all of them right there in DSW. I also love the voice I chose and often talk to Chat about my "Ikigai" musings when I'm outside on a walk. I also have used it so many times before I got Claude for blogs, posts, articles and proposals that I still use it for those things because it gets my writing style. Plus, I've read it is more of a B2C product, so I figure that's how I'll optimize it.
Good: Easy to use on the fly; fun conversationally, my personal thought partner.
Watch out: Probably could get by without it now that we have Enterprise Claude, but since you never know, I'm paying for both. It still does hallucinate, so I still have to read its output. And if it is maxing out on my plan limits, instead of stopping and telling me so like Claude does, it just backs off by telling me in text what it WOULD do, but not actually doing it (I would give you an image like this, then I would embed it into an article like that, etc. - so I feel like I am constantly typing or even screaming "then why don't you just do it?!").
|
|
What I use it for: I asked it to develop a web-based version of the Executagility Prioritization Matrix / Activation Tool / Team Load & Risk Mitigation Analysis that I already had done with Claude and put on my Executagility website. It did, and looked good - but when I asked how to copy the code so I could publish it and compare with users, it spit out overwhelming number of files and I could NOT figure it out. Definitely was NOT "vibe-coding" copy/paste the HTML.
Good: Seems like it will generate great outputs, and theoretically has a whole "team" of AI Subject. Our CTO gets the paid version bundled with his paid version of Cursor (for AI coding).
Watch out: It is expensive so if you don't know what you're going to use it for, I would hold off for a more affordable monthly retainer based model.
|
|
What I use it for: An AI version of me, trained on my content. It gets its own email in Part 3, because the story of what I expected versus what happened is worth telling on its own. Here is my link: https://www.delphi.ai/andreajones
Good: LOVE that I am the OG Andrea Jones on Delphi! If it takes off, I have my own real name (tangent: My LinkedIn is so OG that I also have my own name link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreajones).
Watch out: It hasn’t paid for itself yet. More on that in Part 3.
|
|
What I use it for: An open-source AI agent that can take actions on a computer, not just chat. My OpenClaw agent's name is Nell (Nell_bot Jones), and she has created calendar invites and new contacts for me. However, she has recently gone to sleep a bit; I think her Mac Mini is in standby mode.
Good (ish): When she is good, she's very very good, but when she is bad it is AWFUL. One time she easily created me a vcard I could save to my iPhone contacts, then the next day she said she couldn't do it anymore. It was annoying.
Watch out: Security researchers have found tens of thousands of exposed installations and hundreds of malicious add-ons this year. I literally bought a mac mini so I could use it for Nell_bot, and now I am wondering if I wasted my money.
| The one rule I don’t breakNothing my various AI tools write goes to a client until a person on my team has read it, fixed it (if needed), and would sign their name to it. Today that is mostly me, and that will become a bottleneck at some point. Hopefully the slop will be minimized before that day.
| |
Steal this: my after-meeting prompt
After a client meeting, I paste the Fathom summary into Claude with this: “Turn these notes into three lists: (1) decisions we actually made, (2) action items with an owner and a date, and (3) risks nobody said out loud. Flag anything that sounds like a decision but was never confirmed.” To be fair - Claude came up with this prompt for me, but I tried it immediately and the insights were freaking awesome. So go ahead and use it too!
| An interesting stat Claude dug up:
|
90% vs. 45%
Workers who use AI across seven or more kinds of tasks are twice as likely to report productivity gains as those who use it for only one or two. The gains come from breadth, not from buying more tools.
Source: Gallup, Q2 2026
|
|
Your turnWhat AI tools do you use regularly and what have you dropped? How many models do you pay for? How "sticky" are they, or do you have zero qualms dropping them? I'd love to hear back; your response emails will come to me directly. Talk soon, Andrea Andrea Jones · Principal, AJC Company P.S. If you want a quick read on whether your team has time and competence to uplevel or add AI to the mix, the free Executagility KPI takes about five minutes: take it here.
|
Next in the series · Part 2 · later in October
What I’m building with AI, and whether you’d pay for it
I’ve built a prioritization matrix, a team load chart, and a handful of other tools for our websites without writing code. Next time I’ll show you, and I’d love your thoughts on what to do with them.
|
|
