There’s a line I keep repeating. If you’re not reaching for AI every working hour of every day, you’re leaving a silly amount of productivity on the floor. That’s not a pep talk. That’s the baseline now.
But the bit I don’t say loudly enough — the part that actually matters — is this: work is the shallow end. The real compounding doesn’t happen in your quarterly numbers. It happens in the life you build around them.
The job isn’t using it at work
Most people I talk to are still framing AI as a work tool. A faster way to write an email. A quicker way to build a deck in PowerPoint. A cleaner summary of yesterday’s Teams meeting. All useful. All, honestly, the least interesting thing it can do for you.
The long game is personal. You have been handed, for the price of a monthly subscription, a patient thinking partner who will sit with you on any problem, any time of day or night — no ego, no judgement, no billable hour. Whether that’s a Saturday morning over coffee or the drive home after a rough day. Most of my team haven’t really used it that way yet. Honestly, neither had I, until recently.
Every friction point is now a prompt
Think about the things you’ve been avoiding for weeks. They tend to share a shape. A hard conversation with a business partner. A decision about whether to move the family interstate. A contract for a property that you don’t fully understand and don’t want to ask your agent about in front of the vendor.
Every one of those is now a prompt.
Last month I dropped a forty-page purchase agreement into Copilot and asked it to surface everything that wasn’t in my favour. It took about ninety seconds. I walked into the next conversation with three questions I would never have thought to ask, and one clause I’d been about to sign away without a second look. The deal shifted. That moment — that shift — is what I’m talking about.
The conversation you’ve been dreading? Open Copilot in Word, write out what you want to say, and have it stress-test the tone, the gaps, the places you’re being unfair or being walked on. Weighing a big life decision? Give it your situation, the options and what you actually care about, and let it play devil’s advocate until you can hear your own thinking more clearly. Piles of messy personal documents sitting in OneDrive? Point Copilot at them and start asking.
Disrupt yourself first
The job of a good CEO is to look eighteen months down the track and protect the business from whatever’s coming. Most of us accept that as obvious for the companies we run.
Almost none of us apply it to our own lives.
Your job, right now, as a human being, is exactly the same. Look eighteen months ahead. Ask what’s going to be true then about how work, relationships, careers and decisions get made. Then disrupt yourself before the world does it for you — because the world absolutely will.
The people who quietly pick this up — who use Copilot not just for their inbox but for the harder, more personal stuff — are going to look up somewhere in 2027 and realise they’re living a noticeably different life. Not because AI saved them a few minutes on email. Because they used it to think better, decide better, and act earlier than the people around them.
Absorb. Assemble. Align. Advance.
Start today.
CIAOPS 