I’ve been around long enough to remember when ChatGPT first landed, and everyone lost their minds. I was one of those early adopters who couldn’t resist trying it on every and anything. I used it to write, to test ideas, to have conversations, even arguing just to see how it would respond.
And at the start, it was like discovering rare earth metal. You could ask it to write an email, and it’d come out sounding polished, polite, and just the right amount of corporate. Of course, that also meant people suddenly became “thoughtful communicators.”
You know those resignation emails that start with “After much reflection and gratitude…”? Yeah, all ChatGPT. Fuck that! Because the same people who can’t even be bothered to reply to a Slack message without sounding rude are suddenly reflecting, meditating, and evaluating life choices in neatly formatted paragraphs. They didn’t suddenly become kind; on the contrary they became better at outsourcing sincerity. But that’s beside the point.
If I could actually build the kind of AI I need (one that truly gets how my life works), it wouldn’t be some poetic, godlike assistant that quotes philosophy at me. It would be practical, useful, maybe even nosy. Because honestly, there are so many small but painfully repetitive things I wish AI could just handle.
I want my cameras to come with brains
Everyone that knows me knows that, despite my disciplined demeanor, I can live and die for gist. Proper amebo wearing cap!
Let’s start from my home shall we? I use cameras around my house; Ring cameras, mostly. They’re great, but they’re dumb. All they do is record and notify. Half the time it’s just my neighbor arranging hookups or a delivery guy I already know.
I don’t want constant pings for nothing. What I want is an AI that actually reviews the footage, figures out what matters, and sends me a proper summary. Something like, “Between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., these are the people who came by. Your daughter stopped in around noon. A delivery guy dropped a package. Your neighbor has a new side-chick. Everything else looked normal.”
Basically, a camera that has common sense. If the AI notices someone showing up who has nothing to do with me, or keeps hanging around the elevator, then, sure, alert me. But if it’s just the usual people, don’t bother me. I want to open my email at the end of the day and see a neat, readable recap, not a dump of random clips.
The irony is, AI right now can draw a photorealistic picture of a cat playing poker in Venice but can’t tell me whether the guy pacing around my driveway is harmless or suspicious. Priorities, right?
And if things look bad, let the AI call me on the phone and say, “Bro, something dey happen for your side oh! Your delivery man just ate out of the pizza”
Or it could just talk to people looking for me on my behalf and carry an intelligent conversation. It might even check my contact to compare their details.
AI that fixes Gmail for real
Now, let’s talk about Gmail. I’ve been using Gmail since April 2004, that’s 21 years. My entire digital life is tied to it. And every time Google announces some “intelligent feature,” I brace myself because it usually means I’m about to be disappointed again.
Gemini for Gmail, for instance, is absolute garbage. I don’t know who approved it, but it’s like watching a genius baby drool on itself. It doesn’t understand tone or read context. It’ll suggest the same robotic reply no matter who I’m emailing.
What I actually need is an AI that reads my backlog, understands how I write, and drafts responses in my voice. One that knows when to be polite, brief, or nudge someone for a deal, and when to ignore nonsense entirely. My inbox is like a graveyard of half-read opportunities; emails from partners, deals, employees, investors, all sitting there waiting for a reply I never had time to write.
If I had an AI that could manage that with real understanding, it’d be gold. It could handle follow-ups, highlight urgent conversations, and maybe even warn me about potential miscommunications before they blow up. Imagine it saying, “Hey, this customer’s tone has shifted in the last three messages, something’s off.” That’s the kind of intelligence I want.
AI that knows when trouble’s coming
The amount of data, communication, and product feedback that flows through my company (Lendsqr) daily is massive. And sometimes, problems don’t show up in one big email. They show up as a pattern; a customer getting colder in tone, a project team replying slower, an internal chat thread that suddenly goes quiet.
I want an AI that can notice that. Something that reads patterns across Slack, email, and tickets and quietly tells me, “Hey, this customer looks like they’re about to churn,” or “this project smells like a delay.” or “Rebecca is about to drop an outsourced sincerity email”
That kind of early-warning AI could very well save businesses. Because by the time someone’s frustrated enough to say it, it’s already too late. I’ve seen deals fall apart not because of big failures, but because small signs were ignored. Humans get tired, distracted, or emotionally checked out. Machines don’t. So if AI could flag brewing tension before it turns into chaos for me, that would actually be useful.
The AI sales assistant that actually works
You’d think with all the noise in the market: the AISDRs, the automations, the “AI-driven lead generation platforms”, someone would have built a real sales assistant by now. But most of what’s out there is fluff. Half-baked dashboards that promise to find “warm leads” but end up recommending people who haven’t run a business in years.
I want AI that can search the internet properly, crawl LinkedIn, Crunchbase, even company websites and evaluate potential customers intelligently. Not by counting how many buzzwords they use, but by actually understanding who they are, what they do, and whether they’re a good fit for my product.
Then, I want it to rank them by potential deal size, suggest an appropriate pricing structure, and prepare me for the conversation. Like, “This customer looks promising, but they tend to negotiate hard. Start from this range.” That’s the kind of AI sales agent that would make me loyal forever.
Or even as agents, it goes to do that by itself. I’ve always wanted many Dejiolowes to start with
Right now, though, what we have are glorified scraping tools pretending to be smart. If someone ever builds one that truly works, I’ll probably be the first to pay for it.
AI that makes my website smarter
You know how people visit your site, click around and half the time, leave without getting what they came for. You could have the best content, best product, and the most expensive design, yet users still bounce because they can’t find the one thing they’re looking for. It’s painful to watch, especially when you know the information exists somewhere on your site, buried under layers of pages nobody wants to dig through.
What I want is AI that fixes that kind of nonsense. Not something that throws random recommendations, but an actual system that understands who’s visiting and why. If someone lands on the homepage, I want it to quietly figure out whether they’re a lender, a borrower, or a developer and immediately serve what’s relevant.
Basically, I want the website to feel alive, like it’s paying attention. Not in a creepy way, just in a smart and helpful way. Most websites today are static. They treat every visitor like a stranger even if it’s the same person coming back for the fifth time.
AI could fix that easily if it focused less on trying to be profound and more on solving simple, practical problems like personalization. A system that adapts content dynamically, learns from traffic behavior, and fine-tunes the experience based on what actually works.
Because at the end of the day, that’s what makes a website truly smart. It should feel like it knows what you need and quietly gets it done without asking for a thousand clicks in return.
AI that helps me keep in touch (without pissing people off)
I have close to 6,000 contacts saved on my phone, and over the years, I’ve spoken to more than 5,000 people on WhatsApp. That includes friends, colleagues, partners, former employees, and people I met once and promised to stay in touch with. The truth is, anyone who really knows me can confirm that I’m terrible at keeping up with people.
It’s never something I do deliberately. Life simply moves fast, work never stops, and messages have a way of piling up faster than you can respond to them. I keep telling myself I’ll get better at it, but it never really happens. That’s where I imagine AI could actually help.
I want an AI that can quietly go through my WhatsApp and LinkedIn chats, learn my style of speaking, and remind me when it’s time to reconnect. Something that can help me continue a conversation naturally and only notify me when something interesting or important comes up.
It could say things like, “You mentioned this guy’s product launch a while back, maybe check how it went,” or “It’s been a while since you reached out to your old colleague, should I draft something?” I wouldn’t even mind if it helped me start the conversation, as long as it got the tone right and didn’t sound like a robot pretending to be nice.
The only rule is that it has to stay invisible. No one can ever find out that an AI is helping me manage my social life because that would be awkward for everyone involved. I can already imagine the outrage if people discovered they’ve been chatting with software instead of me.
What I want is something that helps me stay in touch without drawing attention to itself. Because as much as I enjoy connecting with people, there are only so many conversations one person can realistically maintain.
AI that fixes code while I sleep
Not too long ago, we needed to add a small feature to our documentation site, docs.lendsqr.com. Normally, this would have been a two-week cycle, create a ticket, assign it to an engineer, review the code, test it, deploy it, and go through all the usual back-and-forth that comes with production changes. But that day, I was feeling curious, maybe even a bit impatient. Instead of following the process, I decided to see what AI could do.
I gave it the task half-expecting it to fail, or at least make a mess I’d spend hours cleaning up. But within an hour, the feature was written, fixed, and live. No meetings, no tickets, no Slack messages. Just code that worked. It took less time than it usually takes to send a message asking someone to review a PR. That one small experiment completely shifted how I think about AI in engineering.
Our engineers are genuinely brilliant, and I say that with some exaggeration. They do incredible work every single day. But like every engineering team that deals with large systems, there is always more code to refactor than there are hours available to get it done.
What I really want now is an AI that can take on that kind of work every day. One that quietly refactors and optimizes code in the background while everyone else is asleep. Something that goes through the system, cleans up inconsistencies, simplifies functions, and improves performance little by little without needing instructions.
If that existed, I’d probably wake up every morning happier than any cup of coffee could make me.
So what do I really want from AI?
There’s enough chaos in my daily life already. The back-to-back meetings, the half-read emails, the never-ending WhatsApp messages from people who “just wanted to check in.” If AI can step in to handle some of that chaos, I’ll take it. I don’t want it to think for me; I want it to help me think better.
Imagine an AI that knows when you’ve been staring at the same bug for too long and suggests, “Hey, maybe this line isn’t the issue.” Or one that organizes your inbox so well that you never again lose an important message to the black hole of “unread” emails.
If AI can handle the boring stuff then I can focus on the parts of life that are actually human. The parts that make me feel alive. Building, thinking, laughing, arguing, experimenting, and maybe even replying to my WhatsApp messages before everyone assumes I’ve died.
That’s really it. I don’t want an AI that tries to be me. I want one that quietly helps me be a slightly better, less exhausted version of myself.
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