Someone asked a question in a company Slack channel that wasn't addressed to me, and it sent me off to Perplexity asking what I could actually do about the environmental cost of using AI constantly. I made a few changes that week and forgot about it. Eleven months later I went back and checked which ones survived, and found that the habit I'd dropped was the wrong one, the habit I kept religiously does nothing at all, and the two changes that genuinely mattered were ones I'd

I've watched the same AI training get built more than once now, in more than one place. The content is usually fine. People walk out able to tell you the difference between a vague prompt and a specific one, and then nothing changes on Tuesday. What people are missing isn't knowledge. Here's what actually moved people, and why one slide did more than a full curriculum.

There was a conversation I needed to have with another program manager, and I kept not having it. He didn't report to me, he was good at the job, and I didn't want to spend the working relationship badly. So I practiced it first, against a Gem built to play him. It pushed back the way he pushes back, told me exactly where I was hedging, and by the time I sat down with the real person, nothing in it was a surprise. Full prompt at the bottom of the post.

There was one person I just wasn't clicking with, and I couldn't say why. So I did something a little embarrassing: I had AI build a communication profile of me, then one of them, then compared the two side by side. What came back wasn't dramatic. It was just true, and I hadn't sat with it before. Includes the exact prompt I use to build a stakeholder profile from meeting transcripts.

I'd made fifteen AI use case videos with no script format, just whatever felt right that day. I transcribed all of them, fed them to NotebookLM, and asked if there was a pattern I couldn't see. There was. Six parts, and I'd been using them the whole time without knowing it.

I built this from an actual presentation to a team that didn't know where to start with AI, then found myself using the same idea to teach my eighty-something relative about cryptocurrency. Four specific habits, nothing about better tools or more time, just moving AI earlier in what you're already doing. Pick one and see what happens.

The AI features you're not using are already open on your screen. Slack AI finds what you can't. Zoom AI Companion catches you up when you join a meeting late. Google Drive tells you exactly what changed while you were gone. You don't need new tools - you need to know what your current ones can already do.

Every meeting generates data about the people in it. Most of it lives nowhere — in your gut, in half-formed impressions. Here's how I started turning meeting transcripts into communication profiles I actually use.