What I noticed This Year by Irina Kelly
What I Noticed This Year
The feeling that kept showing up wasn't excitement—it was overwhelm. People are anxious
about new tools launching weekly, constant upgrades, and the pressure to keep up. The good
news? You most likely already have the AI tools you need. Enterprise tools like Microsoft
Copilot or Google Workspace cover about 80% of daily work. Add one or two role-specific tools and you're done. UX Designers might follow Figma updates, marketers watch Canva,
accountants track Excel AI workflows.
An exercise that actually reduces anxiety: write down what you do every day—not aspirational work, but real work.
Then look at the tools available in your organization.
You'll find they most likely cover a lot of your use cases
Surprisingly Underused Tools
NotebookLM (Google) Copilot Notebooks (Microsoft) are still surprisingly underused, even
though they solve a real problem—working with your own sources while reducing
hallucinations. They're built for accuracy over creativity, which is what most day to day work
actually needs.
Custom ChatGPTs and Gemini Gems (Google) are the other quiet winner. Most work is
repetitive. These tools turn that repetition into templates—emails, reports, meeting prep. The
quality becomes consistent instead of variable.
The Multimodal Quality Shift
This year, AI moved beyond text. Image generation hit a quality level that expands creative
expression. Video became good enough to create from text prompts. Voice tools became widely usable. The shift wasn't just about creating content—it was about working across mediums that were previously weak or inaccessible.
What's Coming (and What It Demands)
Agents aren't theoretical anymore—they're genuinely powerful technology. But here's what
matters: they'll expose every weakness in how you organize your information. For individuals
and organizations alike, clean content becomes critical. This is true for every AI tool you use—
the more relevant your input, the better your output.
Where Value Is Getting Added
Our roles are expanding and changing. What I'm noticing is that the people getting the most out of AI aren't asking "how can this replace what I do?" They're asking "what becomes possible when the execution work gets easier?"
When you're not stuck in production mode—formatting slides, drafting routine emails, searching for information—you have more capacity for the work that actually requires judgment: synthesis, strategy, deciding what matters.Example: visual storyboarding. If drawing by hand wasn't your skill, you can now explain concepts to clients through AI-generated storyboard sequences. It adds a level of clarity and professionalism that was previously inaccessible without that specialized ability.
