# Strategic AI Adoption Frameworks for Operational Efficiency

**Podcast:** All Things Product with Teresa and Petra
**Published:** 2026-06-30

## Transcript

Hi, folks.
This is All Things Product with Petra Wille.
And Teresa Kors.
And we're so happy you're here.
Teresa, a few weeks back, we recorded an episode how you and I go about learning all things AI.
And I was talking about my timeboxing approach.
And you were talking about your, I just use it to solve challenges and problems and tasks that I'm having.
And ever since I'm carrying this around in conversations with my coaches, and what I'm realizing, and I would like to hear your thoughts about it, is people that are not Teresa Torres seem to have, yeah, too small problems maybe to really create meaningful change with AI or not enough inspiration.
what they could use AI for.
So that is a lot of the conversation that I'm having that I try to inspire them to think bigger when it comes to what things they could try AI support for.
So any thoughts on that?
Yeah, I don't think the problem is that they don't have enough big enough problems.
I think everybody has big enough problems.
I think there's a learning curve here, right?
So how do you, you don't know what to use AI for until you know what AI is good at and like how to use AI.
So there's a little bit of like a chicken and an egg problem.
I can share what I did and then I can also share how I'm trying to help other people with this exact same problem.
So the first thing that I did was I just started to build a daily habit where I tried to pick one thing that I had to do in my job every single day, pick one thing that I had to do in my job and try to see if AI is good at it.
So I literally like, okay, I have 10 things on my to-do list today.
This is the one I'm going to have AI take a cut at.
And sometimes AI was good at it and I was pleasantly surprised.
A lot of times AI was awful at it.
But then it became this exercise of like, okay, well, how can I help the AI be better at it?
And that's what drives the learning, right?
Like I'm just experimenting.
I'm trying a lot of things.
I'm testing the boundaries of what is it good at and what is it not good at.
And honestly, after doing that like five times, I started to see, oh, this is the type of thing AI is good at.
And I'll share even I'm a year and a half in of doing this.
And I still force myself to do this because I still.
have assumptions about what AI won't be good at.
And those assumptions are becoming not true every day.
Right?
Yeah, because it's so rapidly changing what AI can do.
And yeah, I agree.
Yeah.
So I think like everybody, like literally everybody, I don't even mean knowledge workers.
I mean, literally everybody could be using AI to help them with something.
So I don't think it's true that people don't have things that AI could help with.
I think however many billions of people we have on the planet, they all have something AI could help with.
I think the problem is we don't recognize those things until we start using AI.
So I think this habit of like, I'm going to try one new thing every day to do with AI is a really great foundational habit.
Yeah.
What I see a lot of people being blocked by is this, I'm already behind.
If I'm joining the game now, my setup time will be so long.
I cannot afford this five hours that I think it'll take to get an okay-ish clawed code environment going.
That's what's blocking a lot of people.
I will share last March.
when I started this journey, I felt really behind.
I think most people look at me and they don't think I'm behind anymore, but I started feeling really behind.
So I think this is that.
All of us are behind.
Yeah.
Like what is the proverb?
The best time to plant a tree was 50 years ago.
And the next best time is today.
Right.
Like just get started.
And then I think.
It can take five hours, but you don't have to let it take five hours.
So you could try one small thing a day.
And if it's not very good at it, you can choose.
You move on.
I want to spend a little more time to try to make it good.
Or do I want to just move on?
And if it's a particularly busy day, you might just move on.
That's what my time boxing comes in.
Yeah.
If you got a little bit extra time, you might get curious and follow a thread.
Right?
Yeah.
The other thing that I've learned and I read very broadly and one thing that has helped me is just seeing what other people do.
And so this is something that I'm trying to curate for other people.
So I wrote an AI at home blog post.
I wrote an AI at work blog post.
Both of these blog posts just list lots and lots and lots of ways you can use AI.
And I'm not...
I didn't write those saying this is how you should use AI.
I wrote them as this is how I use AI.
Hopefully this inspires you to see how you might use it in your own way, right?
And then I also host monthly Claude Code show and tell sessions where people from my community just demo what they're doing.
And one, it's a way to build momentum and inspire people and to let people show off what they're doing, which is really fun.
People love it.
Yeah.
Like it's just, it's super fun.
And just like when we were in elementary school, we got to go to show and tell and like share our favorite toy.
It's the same idea.
Like, Hey, I built this cool thing.
Here's what it does for me.
And sometimes people share things that like are so bespoke.
Like one guy built this like concert review website for himself.
It's very elaborate.
It probably has zero market other than him.
But he loved it.
And he learned a ton.
And he was so proud of it.
And the rest of the group were blown away by like how much he was able to do.
He's not an engineer.
He'd never built anything before.
And so like, it doesn't matter that the thing he built isn't relevant to you.
It shows you what's possible.
And then it might spark this seed of like, oh, I've always had this idea that I forgot about.
I could build that.
If you could build this, then I could build that.
And I think that's really important is to find peers and community, whether that's through like my community or whether that's by just watching YouTube videos, whether that's your local meetup.
It doesn't really matter, right?
But like find a way.
to just be exposed to what's becoming possible.
Yeah, and don't be too stressed.
We've recorded an episode on AI FOMO, I know.
Go back, listen to that one.
But just briefly, the more complex these AI setups become, the more people are afraid of using it to some extent because they think it will...
do too much magic things, which is then out of their control and stuff like that.
And.
I constantly find myself in these conversations where I tell people, you don't have to connect it to everything on your machine.
This is definitely not something that you need to do to start learning what it actually can do and is capable about.
You can keep it rather conversational and you can copy and paste text into your prompts and see how this turns out.
And then at some point you maybe are...
fine with it to create MD slash text files on your machine, but you don't have to go full agentic API MCP logins for everything from the beginning.
I think that would be weird anyways.
So you're making new friends.
Yeah, people shouldn't do that from the beginning.
I use this all day, every day, and I don't do most of those things.
No, me neither.
Right?
Like I let it read and write like text files, but it doesn't have access to my email.
And I don't use a million MCP servers.
Like you don't, the vast majority of what's out there is noise.
And this is why I like what we talked about in our previous episode.
Like I really frame it as I have a problem I need to solve.
I have a piece of work I'm trying to do.
I'm not going out and trying every new technology.
I'm not looking for MCP servers for the sake of MCP servers.
I'm not downloading every new AI app that comes out.
I ignore the vast majority of that stuff.
So like I said, I'm a year and a half in.
I've been using this every day.
I still have never tried cursor, which blows people's mind, but I don't need it.
Me neither.
I'm pretty happy with my tool.
I have used one MCP server.
A grand total of one.
And I used it for a very specific task of pushing content to Trello.
Right?
I don't really use plugins.
I actually find the plugin interface to be terrible.
I steal skills from ideas from other people.
And I look at their code so that I can learn how to build it.
Yeah, but I don't steal skills from other people.
That's another thing that I...
I can't.
I have to create these skills myself to get the best outcome possible.
And I get my inspiration from other people's skills, but I always have to build them myself.
Yeah, I didn't mean I actually take their skills.
I mean, I steal their ideas from their skills.
Ah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
What they build never works for me out of the box.
No.
The value of this is you get to make it your own, right?
Yeah.
The hyper-personalization is what we're looking for.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So I think the reason why I find starting with a task or starting with a problem to solve is so helpful is that I get to ignore all the noise.
It's only relevant to me if it's helping me with the task I'm doing right now.
And then that takes this infinite universe and turns it into like, okay, there's like three things that might be able to help me right now.
Let me have Claude explain those three things to me and I'm going to pick one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's how I like to go about it as well, more or less.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's how people could find big enough problems and enough inspiration to learn more about AI on their own terms.
I think the one thing I'll close with is we talk a lot about agency.
We talk about a lot about like bias for action.
And I think those are the right terms to be throwing around, but I'm not sure we fully understand what they mean.
And I think always when we do something for the first time, there's this fear of the unknown.
Yeah.
Like I'm looking at a task.
I know I need to do the task.
I'm going to play Teresa's game and say, how can AI help with this?
And then immediately you're going to feel stuck.
You're going to feel like I don't even know what to ask.
A beginner.
I don't even know where to begin.
And this is where you want to remember those terms, bias towards action, have some agency.
You don't have to know how to do it.
All you have to do is try something.
It might totally fail.
That's okay.
Literally try something.
And that try something could be open up chat GPT, open up Claude, literally type, I have to do this task.
How can you help?
and then read the response.
And then take it from there.
And go from there.
Like, that's it.
Like, the magical thing about these tools is you don't have to know how to do anything.
They will walk you through it.
And it'll probably be terrible.
Like, let's be honest.
The first response will probably be terrible.
And then you can just be like, you literally can be like, this was terrible.
What can I tell you to help you do a better job?
So you don't even have to know how to fix it.
You can just be like, This was terrible.
And then the AI will ask you, well, what was terrible about it?
What did you not like?
Okay, well, here's maybe what I can do.
Right?
And so...
I had such a fun session with MidJourney yesterday, which took us nowhere.
And it was exactly the same conversation.
I was like, oh my God, all these pictures are terrible.
So we really need to rewrite this prompt from the ground on because the results are not great.
And then we did it.
And now the results are better.
So I think you started this with people might not have big enough problems for AI to help with.
If you have a to-do list, you have problems AI can help with.
I like that framing.
Right?
Very helpful.
I think it's just play a little bit.
15 minutes a day.
Go play.
15 minutes a day.
I like that.
Thanks, Teresa.
Thanks, Petra.