Make the agent your first move

Most people try an AI tool for a week, use it for the odd email, then slowly go back to old habits. The people who get the most from it change one thing: before they start a task themselves, they ask, could I hand this over?

What you can usually hand over

• Research: "Find the three main competitors to this supplier and what they charge."
• First drafts: the proposal, the policy update, the reply to a tricky email.
• Comparisons: three quotes, two contract versions, last year against this year.
• Summaries: a long report, a thread of emails, a chat you missed.
• Checking: totals that should add up, names spelled the same way, dates that match.
• Tidying: a messy spreadsheet, a folder of badly named files, notes into a clean list.

Think like a manager, not a typist

A chatbot answers one question at a time. An agent can take a whole job, and it can bring in helpers of its own. One way to picture it: instead of working with one person, limited by that person's brainpower, memory and time in the day, you are working with a manager who has unlimited staff underneath them.

So ask for the whole job, the way you would brief a capable colleague, not one small step at a time.

What stays with you

Relationships, judgment calls, and knowing what really matters to your clients and colleagues stay with you. The point is not to hand over everything. It is to hand over the rest, so you have more time for those.