Your Personal AI Action Plan

To drive real results, AI can’t be something you dabble with randomly. It has to attach to real friction in your day-to-day work, or it turns into “you tried ChatGPT for a week” and moved on.

By pinpointing where time and energy are leaking, you can turn those into a practical AI action plan you can use immediately. This also frees up time so you can look at the larger impacts of AI more strategically in the organization.

If you want the upside of AI, but:

• you’re not sure where it fits in your real work
• you’ve tried it ad hoc, gotten mixed results, and lost momentum
• you’re busy, so “learn AI” keeps losing to urgent client and ops stuff

…then you need an intentional AI plan.

Start With Friction, Not Features

Instead of starting with features, prompts, or tools, let’s start with your actual work. What are the high-friction activities in your world? The way to identify these is the same as at the organizational level I’ve spoken about before. Ask yourself one question:

“What are you doing today that is not the ideal use of your time, and how much time does it take each month?”

Inventory those friction areas. This should be about friction in your daily life, not “ooh, I could use technology over here.” Great symptoms of friction points are things like thinking “this should be easier” or “I hate doing this drudgery.” Where are you personally the bottleneck to processes that the team is waiting on you for? Those are great pointers to friction.

Here are some real examples of what friction items might look like:

• Fifteen minutes of prospect research before each sales conversation, 10-12 times a week
• Handling emails one hour per day
• Collecting data from the timesheets system to generate invoices, 30 minutes each week
• Writing a blog article twice a month, two hours each
• Pushing the team for status updates, 10 minutes daily

Here’s a customGPT that helps walk you through that discovery journey and will even suggest ways that AI might be able to help for various items: https://go.aiwhy.io/ai-action-plan-builder

Prioritize Your List

Once you have the initial list (ideally five to ten things), the next step is to prioritize. Which of these is going to have the greatest impact so you can actually start digging in?

Ask yourself: Is this something that makes sense to automate, or do I, or another human, really need to have our hands doing all of it? Not everything should be automated. Some things just need a better process, or they need to stay human because judgment matters.

Focus first on high-frequency, low-complexity tasks. That prospect research example? Fifteen minutes times ten conversations a week is over ten hours a month. That’s a solid target.

Match Friction to the Right AI Type

Now we need to match those friction areas to the right kind of AI. Here’s the key: focus on the least amount of automation possible to drive the benefit.

Reactive Assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.)

Is this something you could just ask ChatGPT? Research tasks, reviewing content, being a thinking partner, drafting first versions. These are reactive assistant territory. You prompt, it responds, you iterate.

Task Agent (Zapier, n8n, Make)

Or is this really a process you want automated? You trigger it, information is automatically gathered, results are generated and handed to you. That’s a task agent, something you build once and it runs on its own.

Before building anything custom, check if this capability already exists in software you have or might purchase. Video tools like Riverside or Descript have AI features that automatically turn lengthy videos into shorts, blog posts, and LinkedIn posts. Your CRM might already have AI-powered lead scoring. Do some research first. The solution may already exist as a feature you just haven’t turned on yet.

Digital Staffer

Is there an opportunity for a digital staffer on your team? Someone you can interact with via Slack or Teams, send them a message, and they get to work generating results for you.

When getting started, it’s most likely something for a reactive assistant or a task agent. Digital staffers are typically found solving organizational-level problems, not for individuals, because they require a much bigger investment to put together.

And of course, as you’re going through this inventory, ChatGPT itself is a great place to ask: “Here are the friction items I’m seeing in my work processes. How might you help me address any of these?”

Define What Success Looks Like

For each opportunity where AI can help, have a clear understanding of what success looks like. If I do this, how does it help?

Is this saving me four hours a week of prep time? Is this saving me one hour every time I have a new project to do research? Be specific. What’s it helping with so that you can measure if it’s being successful, and whether it’s even worth doing?

Even if this is going to be something automated, all AI really starts as a prompt. Being able to clearly articulate the job you want done is the critical starting step. Can you envision a prompt that could solve or do this work? If you can’t explain it clearly, you’re not ready to automate it.

Share Your Wins

As you get personal wins, share them with the team. There are definitely others dealing with similar friction who can learn from what you figured out, whether that’s using the same solution you came up with or using it as inspiration for their own journey.

This doesn’t have to be formal. A quick Slack message like “Hey, I’ve been using this prompt to cut my prospect research time in half. Happy to share it” goes a long way. You might be surprised how many people were struggling with the same thing and just needed someone to show them it was solvable.

When individuals share what’s working, the whole organization gets smarter about AI without needing a top-down initiative. Those small wins compound.

Where This Can Go Sideways

It’s easy to fall into the trap of “I can apply AI over here.” This is about friction (your friction, the business friction) and nothing to do with technology as you’re first creating the plan.

Automating something you don’t fully understand yet. If you can’t explain the steps to a human, you can’t explain them to AI. You need to know the process before you automate it.

Going straight to building agents when a simple prompt template would solve 80% of the problem. Start with the lowest-tech solution that works. A saved prompt you copy-paste is still a win.

Wrap Up

Start with one friction point. Get a win. Then iterate.

The goal isn’t to AI-ify everything. It’s to free up your time for work that actually needs you.

Take Action

• Get practical, real-world AI insights: Connect with me on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbratton
• Dive into free AI courses to accelerate your journey – https://www.aiwhy.io/events

About the Author

Alex Bratton is the author of Practical AI for Leaders and Billion Dollar Apps, an adjunct professor of computer science, and the CEO & Chief Geek of Lextech, an Apple enterprise partner that applies cutting-edge tech to drive employee efficiency for teams through tech-powered experiences people love.

Alex is an applied technologist who leads Lextech’s AIWhy efforts to bring practical AI to the mid-market: https://aiwhy.io