GoKawiilSam Liang is appalled as I confess my technique for recording an interview: running the Voice Memos app on an iPhone and transferring the transcript manually to a Google Doc. The CEO of Otter, a transcription service for analyzing meetings, looks at me as if I tried to call into our video chat using a rotary phone. He believes, naturally, that I should switch to Otter. He’s probably right.
It’s all part of a new identity at work (and maybe at home): the AI native. Time-saving productivity tools like next-gen note-takers, task-based agents, and chatty inbox assistants are exploding in popularity as they invade every nook and cranny of our digital lives. While it’s critical to keep concerns about security and hallucinations top of mind when using any AI feature, early adopters are developing a fluency that will likely pay dividends for years to come.
Being AI native—or “agentic,” as AI natives say—means staying adaptable to new experiences. Transcription failures aside, I’ve embraced experimentation, from generating AI podcasts to letting Claude organize my desktop files. (Some of this I talked about in my newsletter series last year, AI Unlocked.) If you want to get so good at using AI tools that your coworkers start questioning whether it's blood or ribbon cables running beneath your skin, here are my seven tips for AI-powered ascendance.
1. Kill Your Chatbots
ChatGPT is so 2022. These days, the cool kids are all about Codex. Your eyes may glaze over, rightfully, at the mention of “AI agents,” but compared to anything on the market even a year ago, software automation tools like Codex and Anthropic’s Cowork are leagues better at actually taking over your computer and completing tasks. Don’t waste your time fiddling with a single chatbot when you could be commanding a whole army of them.
2. Go Voice Mode
Oh, you’re still typing up everything you want your AI tools to do, Boomer-style? That’s cute. But trust Otter’s Liang: “Voice will become more dominant moving forward,” he tells me. “People hate writing.” (He caveats that I, a journalist, probably don’t hate writing, which is, mostly, true.) This move is primarily for the input, not necessarily the output. I rarely use the voice-only mode on ChatGPT, for instance, but I often speak a prompt into my phone and then skim the written output.
3. Build a Sandbox
Even though agents are actually good now, the rascally little devils can still eff everything up without proper boundaries. (Earlier this year, a Claude-powered agent deleted a startup’s entire production database and backups.) So if you’re ready to have some external entity take control of your computer, you need to spend an afternoon researching everything these tools can do and set up some dedicated folders with the files you want them to access.
4. Give It Everything You’ve Got
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