Calling sellers about his orders was one of Josh's biggest pain points — so the AI took it over: it called a seller to correct his shipping address, and called a seller to resend his missing orders.
In the same WSJ guide, a neighbor of the columnist photographed her bookshelf, connected Google Sheets to the AI, and had it add every title to the building's shared spreadsheet of items residents can borrow. The columnist then did the same with her own shelf.
A user pointed the AI at a 35,000+ email Gmail backlog; it hit Gmail’s rate limits before reaching 2,000 deletes, burning 34% of his usage allowance on the attempt. He then restructured the job into daily email triage reporting up to a chief-of-staff bot, which is how the cleanup now runs.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Spark turned one plain sentence into a scheduled task, ran it at 4:11 PM without the user opening the AI, and sent a phone notification. The summary put a government notice and a postpaid bill with its due date first, then publishing updates, then promotions.
Across the same two-week inbox-and-calendar test, the AI proactively flagged every one of the author's seven calendar double-bookings before the meetings occurred.
Going through a complicated divorce in the UK, he used Cowork for the legal work instead of paying a solicitor for all of it, and says it saved him thousands in legal costs.
Three family members, three nationalities, one move to Brazil. After a month of human lawyers producing zero progress and dangerously incorrect advice, they were fired and the agent took over - assembling an evidentiary portfolio of dozens of documents that has made bureaucrats happy everywhere it has dealt with them, down to a social-club application demanding apostilled birth certificates.
His charity food pantry needed a barcode scanner and stock checker but could not afford a paid system. He built one with AI in two days, and it now runs on a laptop in the pantry.
Peter Yang ran a learn how I write skill in an AI app Duet. It read 33 of his sent emails, 89 Slack messages, 47 DMs and 11 docs, then saved a writing guide as a skill that Duet now uses to draft his email replies in his own style for him to check before sending.