Without being asked, Harry McCracken's Dot began flagging incoming messages it judged urgent or important in an inbox flooded with PR pitches. It also resurfaced an email from a freelance author that he had overlooked for weeks and nudged him to respond.
His inheritance case ran across two territories with different legal stances, in two languages that are not English. Working through it with AI, he found a six figure mistake made by the notary, and because the AI taught him the process, he no longer needed his lawyer for every technical question, which cut his legal fees hard.
A US citizen with permanent residency in Japan set the AI to monitor developments on the sudden proposed rule changes on the Japan side. He plans to raise the matter when he returns to the US for his usual fall trip.
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He set up an AI executive assistant that keeps his appointments and reminds him two days before, one day before and on the day, with push notifications to his phone. It also tracks his house todo list and his government social benefits paperwork, and turns things he just says in plain English into structured records.
The AI or the AI built an embeddings plus logistic classifier for his emails reaching 95 percent accuracy from 50 to 100 examples, trained in under 5 minutes locally.
Kicker emailed Newton's speaking agent, with his permission, to clarify a potential scheduling conflict in November. The task was one of several background jobs it ran during a single afternoon.
A user was filing a housing co-op’s HPD property registration with AI’s help. Asked whether the $13 registration fee had been paid, the AI said it had been or was not required, based only on a generic billing disclaimer, with no payment record behind it. Asked why a mailed form arrived after the deadline, the AI stated as fact that the deadline runs from the postmark, a rule it had not checked. Both claims were corrected only after he challenged them. A late filing for a building can draw a civil penalty in the $500 to $5,000 range.
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Agent manages the import and export process for the international move of his pet, including comms and form filling, and corrals the family's move documentation.
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.