Knowledge Worker AI Onramp

This post is for my normie friends.

This is my guess at what your experience will be as you use AI more and more thru your work this year.

Let's look at your AI onramp:

Copy/Paste: You copy/paste with chat
Copilot: You have AI work where you work
Autopilot: You gain trust on AI's outputs for certain tasks and flip switch from copilot to autopilot
Systems Thinking: You approach all tasks with innate understanding where AI can help, where AI needs more tools, more context (info), and you flip more switches to autopilot

1. Copy/Paste#

You've tried at least one of the 3 major AI chat bots from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google.

You've gone beyond chatting to copy-pasting text back and forth with the AI. It's a great proof reader.

You've realized that each AI provider performs better or worst on certain things.

You've seen that different models within a provider have different qualities of intelligence (say Haiku, Sonnet, Opus for Anthropic).

You've had it do research for you, again finding out that are better than others.

You've subscribed to one of the AI's $ so you can use the higher intelligence when you need it.

You've caught the AI making a few errors. It has caught dozens of errors in your work.

You've started to notice turns of phrase that are tropes of AI writing.

You've become annoyed when coworkers send you slop.

You've explained the term "slop" to friends and family.

You've become annoyed with all the copy-pasting and wondered if there is a better way...

2. Copilot#

You've got the AI chat app on your phone.

You've realized the desktop app can do things the web version can't, like edit files on your computer and more connections to other tools like work email and calendar.

You've done research with it and now have it save that research on your computer as a CSV/doc/markdown file.

You've started asking people what model they used to generate X.

You've scheduled it to summarize all your emails each morning.

You've watched youtube videos with terms "skills, mcp, openclaw" and don't know what any of it means yet.

You're starting to understand what is meant by "context window".

You've saved 5min here and there, sometimes even 30min+ as your copilot handles some of the subtasks of a greater task.

You've started making projects in the app so that has ready access to important info/context for all conversations about that topic.

You've started wiring more connections/tools into the AI so it has more information to work from (and saves you from grabbing that info when it lives in obvious places).

You've started to curate its memories and know when to start new sessions/chats to clear the context window.

You've become annoyed that you need to approve send every time for the simple stuff that you trust the AI to get right every time...

3. Autopilot#

You've trusted it on tasks of this type and that complexity.

You've started to look for ways to have it just do those things.

You've figured out how to get the agent to "close the loop" on that task - that one task is on autopilot now.

You've had the AI desktop app drive your browser as you watch.

You've started to see what it parts of browser tasks it has trouble with and what it flys thru.

You've started thinking for each task whats the necessary context required for any agent to complete it well.

You've wondered how to get that context into the agent, you look for the right connectors to get your organization's info into your agent.

You've started having AI play a copilot role in nearly every task you do.

You've got a handful of tasks on autopilot now.

You've started to see what might be required to automate more things...

4. Systems Thinking#

You've started to see how you need to gather up certain context across the org in new ways for the agent to have the information it needs. Things that were just institutional knowledge before now needs to be captured, updated, and exposed to the agent.

You've realized that the email summarizer you set up a few weeks ago is only as smart as the context you gave it and tweaked that summarizer prompt a few times to improve it.

You've stopped being annoyed when coworkers send slop. Now you understand that they haven't understand how best to use the tool yet and share some tips with them (and in the mean time you just use your agent to summarize documents that are 10x longer than they need to be).

You've deliberately chosen not to automate x, y and z. Friction is sometimes a feature. And there are things you should hold in your head to feed your strategic thinking.

You've started to convince others to record meetings and extract important knowledge from the transcripts.

You've thoughtfully re-arranged your workday so that you can have deliberate focus time for the things that require your best thinking.

Where are you on this path?