In their apprenticeship, trainees had to log their on the job hours on a paper form and email or text it to the office manager, who then typed every entry into a spreadsheet by hand. He built an app so apprentices can submit their hours directly. Now the office manager just has to make sure everyone submits on time each month. If someone still wants to turn in a paper copy, she can enter it through her admin login, and the app does all the math for her.
He says he cannot code, but he used AI to produce a working replacement for Lightroom for his own photo work. It works well enough that he ditched his Adobe subscription.
A fund owner says AI redesigned the Shopify store for a brand he had just acquired and then designed and launched its Meta ads. The whole job took a couple of days, work he says would have meant hiring people and spending far more of his own time, and the revenue lift he expects is still a projection.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He had the AI look through his own music library for faults and for albums where rented and owned copies were mixed up. The AI made a full interactive view of what it found.
He drives for an assisted living facility that tracked every resident trip on spreadsheets the front desk found hard to use. He built a web app with AI that shows all trips past, present and future with conflicts and updates, from his desktop or phone. It improved his daily work and the front desk’s, and took a few months where the old way would have taken about a year.
She wrote an AI script that transcribes her French tutoring recordings and measures the speaking balance between her and her tutor. Her speaking share has improved over the sessions since she started tracking it.
He took an ESP32 board out of its bag and, with AI setting it up, had it sending his van's battery, charging, and solar data over Bluetooth and MQTT to Home Assistant in 5 minutes.
His SightRead.org project uses the MusGlyphs font, but glyphs he needed were missing, and editing the font by hand was so off putting that his releases slowed down. The AI added the glyphs he needed with little handholding, then went back and fixed his own hand made glyphs with consistent spacing and no warnings.
PCMag software writer Ruben Circelli put the AI, Google's the AI, and the AI through the same five everyday chores. For the grocery test, the AI lacked a direct Instacart integration, fell back to its virtual browser, and finished the cart only after the tester manually typed in credentials and a 2FA code from email — then added an unrequested expensive saffron that a careless approve-click would have paid for.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.