There's a particular flavour of dread I keep bumping into at the moment.
It usually starts on LinkedIn – someone you vaguely know has "completely transformed their workflow with AI", a competitor is apparently doing in minutes what takes your team a fortnight, and everyone with a newsletter is very keen to tell you the train has left and you are not on it.
So you feel behind. Which I understand.
But almost nobody is actually ahead. The people posting breathlessly about it are, of course, either selling something or describing a lovely pretty demo. What's happening in reality is mostly: AI is going slowly slowly in the finance function, whatever you might feel reading LinkedIn at 11pm.
So no – you haven't missed the boat. There is no boat.
But that's not a reason to do nothing.
You don't have to do something dramatic. Having a play with it is enough (for now!).
And *playing* is the whole trick. You don't need a project. Just find one boring task – the data file reformatting you have to do every month, repetitive boilerplate commentary, an email you keep putting off – and twenty minutes to see whether a tool can have a go at it. Some of it will be useless (some of it will be quite spectacularly useless!). But keep going and you will probably get something genuinely useful out of it.
I'm finding that the smaller the task you try, the better, as well; makes it a bit easier to "solve".
That, broadly, is the difference between worrying about AI and beginning to get it. One is free but makes you feel terrible. The other costs you twenty minutes and a bit of curiosity.
So stop reading about "who's ahead". Go and have a play!
(one particular tip that makes this easier: don't decide for the AI what it can't do. Worry about picking a task. More than once now I've assumed the AI won't be able to do anything, and I have been wrong, so just try!)
