As a network engineer, I spend my days inspecting equipment, building internet infrastructure, and maintaining systems to keep everything running smoothly. But since I work in a corporate environment, I also have to deal with endless paperwork. Documentation was never really difficult, but it was always genuinely annoying. About two years ago, I decided I had enough and started automating my paperwork with AI. As time passed, better AI tools emerged, and I learned to manage documents much more efficiently. Most of my coworkers actively use AI now, but I know for a fact that not everyone has jumped on board just yet. Many of the older, more experienced employees are simply not used to AI, so they stick to their traditional ways of doing things. I started thinking about how I would feel if I did not know how to use AI, and I realized I would constantly worry about falling behind and working inefficiently. I decided to write this to ease that same worry for anyone feeling the same way.
The Illusion of the Perfect Setup
You have probably heard people say you will fail if you do not use AI or that you need to start right this second. People repeat that until you are sick of hearing it. But there is a common misconception you need to drop right now. Copying how other people use AI is actually pretty useless. Every company has a different work style and different daily tasks. I personally spent money on expensive courses to study AI technology, but I often failed to use any of it because the lessons simply did not fit my actual workflow. The core secret comes down to just one thing. You just need to ask yourself how you can hand off the specific tasks you repeat every single day or week to an AI. Finding the answer to that question together with the AI is the real starting point.
If you are currently stuck in an endless loop of watching tutorials and buying courses without actually applying anything you should definitely read my previous piece on Why Learning AI Tools Is a Waste of Your Time. It explains why chasing every new feature is the fastest way to ruin your actual productivity.
But when you finally decide to start, you run into walls. The company does not provide training, you are too busy to study on your own, there are no internal experts to ask, and you are terrified of security risks. So you just push it off and tell yourself you will do it later. It breaks my heart whenever I see this happen. The real key is not about how brilliantly you use AI right out of the gate. It is far more important to just start quickly, even if you have no experts and absolutely zero time to study.
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| That perfect moment you are waiting for was never coming |
I realized something important while working at my own company. When a company delays using AI, it is never actually because of a lack of experts or lingering security issues. It is entirely because of the mindset that you must be perfectly prepared before you begin. I know it sounds structurally important to find experts, train your employees, figure out the perfect tools, and establish airtight security policies. But if you try to prepare everything perfectly, you will literally never start. That day of perfect preparation will simply never arrive. We are always short on time because of our actual jobs, and AI is constantly upgrading anyway. You need to flip your thinking right now. You just have to start, and you will naturally learn how to use AI along the way. That is why you do not need an expert, and you do not need to carve out extra time to study. I will break this down into three steps based on my own direct experience.
Start With One Stupidly Simple Task
The first step is to pick just one task. Look at what you are doing repetitively every day or week and ask how you can hand it over. In my case, the very first thing I handed off was summarizing my daily equipment inspection logs into a report format my manager could actually skim in thirty seconds. You only need to pick one thing like sending out quote emails or writing up meeting minutes. You should never try to replace all your work with AI from day one. That is easily one of the biggest mistakes people make. Just pick one annoying task that eats up your time every week and start right there. If the task you choose has a really complicated process and a massive workload, you can just select a small fraction of it. If you try to force AI across your entire operation from the beginning, you will never even get off the starting block.
If you are someone who constantly delays taking action because you want the entire system to be perfectly structured from day one I highly recommend reading Why Your Need for Perfection Is Killing Your Business. It will genuinely change how you view the early stages of any project.
Draw One Clear Line In The Sand
The second step is to add just one standard when using AI for that specific task. If security worries you, or you are afraid confidential information will leak, you do not need to panic. You just need to set one strict rule dictating what data is allowed in and what data is absolutely forbidden. You can easily set boundaries for things like customer information, sales data, or contract documents. In my own network engineering work, the one line I never cross is uploading actual equipment configurations or IP addressing schemes, even though everything else about the inspection process goes through AI freely. Setting these boundaries makes using AI a lot safer. Do not try to build some grandiose security system because of fear. Giving the AI a clear guideline that these critical pieces of data must never be uploaded is a much faster and easier way to actually get moving.
Write The One Page Rulebook
The final step is to strictly operate within that established standard while doing the task. This applies whether you are working entirely alone or working alongside your employees. If the standards change depending on who is doing the work, the results will be all over the place, and you might run into some fairly unexpected issues. All you need to do is write down a one page summary stating that your company uses AI for this specific task based on this specific standard.
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| Same rules for everyone in the room |
Once AI settles in and starts running smoothly on one tiny task, the next phase gets a lot easier. You just find a second and third task and apply the same method. Before you know it, AI will start flowing through every corner of your company without any expert coaching you over your shoulder.
Why The Underdogs Always Win Here
There is something truly crucial you need to understand here. The most important factor when bringing AI into a company is not technical skill or proficiency. The most important person is simply the one who thoroughly understands the work system and structure of the company. That could be the CEO or it could be the manager in charge of the task. Think about it for a second. Have I mentioned a single technical thing about how to operate AI so far? I have not. I only told you to find small routine tasks in your company and set a standard. That means smaller companies are actually in a much better structural position to adopt and use AI than massive corporations.
My company is not some massive corporate giant either. Because we are small, there was no rigid manual, and a few of us were able to build a foundation for AI use relatively easily. If your company is not massive, this is actually your greatest advantage. In smaller companies, the CEO is usually involved in the actual work, so they know the intricate details of the tasks. That makes it so much easier to communicate with the person in charge and establish those rules and standards rapidly. That is why I say you hold the upper hand.
Experience Always Beats Theory
I was definitely not good at using AI from the beginning. I just started playing around with ChatGPT out of pure curiosity and naturally went through a lot of trial and error. I even felt a bit cheated recently because Claude suddenly felt a lot dumber than it used to be. But after experiencing AI firsthand, I realized that while learning from an expert is nice, just trying everything yourself is ultimately far more helpful.
I have been building my career in the IT industry for ten years now, since 2016, and I currently build various infrastructure through network management. AI is heavily used in my field right now, and I can genuinely feel that efficiency and quality have gone up significantly while requiring fewer resources than before. Do not let yourself feel overwhelmed, and just try firing up ChatGPT right now. It got a nice upgrade recently, so the quality of the answers is actually pretty decent again. Do not wait for the perfect moment to figure everything out, because the only way to master the tools of tomorrow is to blindly mess around with them today.
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