You don’t need to be a tech expert to benefit from the artificial intelligence (AI) that is available right now. AI can become your silent sidekick in daily life. As I explore and engage with new tools in my work in innovation, entrepreneurship, and service design, it can be hard to see what is beyond the hype. It requires you to engage your entrepreneurial mindset skills to see how these nine everyday uses for AI are already making life easier.
Generative AI overwhelm
In early 2025, Marc Zao-Sanders, co-founder of Filtered.com and author of the book Timeboxing, released a 104-page report called “How People are Really Using Generative AI Now”. This report notes that with the development and exposure to AI, the uses for it, even in such a short time as a year, are changing and maturing. This is in tandem with a better understanding of its limitations and potential. Still, many people find themselves reluctant to use it all.
The information that Zao-Sanders collects and analyses in this report comes from many online sources where people are talking about how they are using AI themselves – crowdsourcing their usage.
These are meant to be used as a tool to make your everyday life easier
This blog post has been created to help you make your first attempt to engage with generative AI (genAI). Using what I have learned while working with these different genAI models in my work, I want to simplify and showcase practical and ethical uses of it to take away some of the mystery. From the report of the top 100 use-cases for genAI, I have chosen nine that I view as being most approachable and useable for just about anyone. Thinking about the user perspective of someone who wants to cautiously approach genAI, I have curated these nine for their ease of use and their ethicality. These are not generative in the traditional sense of the word, meaning to generate something new. These are not going to try to replicate something that other people do.
For reference, I will also add what rank they have in the top 100 in the report so that you can find them the report if you wish. Each of the 100 has a single page with quotes and other information there that represents those who use it. I have not kept them in their original order but re-ordered them in more of an ease-of-use priority.
It is also important to add a note that while AI can save time and effort, it also consumes energy. If you are cautious about its environmental impact, simply learning how people are using it can be insightful.
9 low-barrier ways to use generative AI
Here are nine different ways to to start using genAI.
1. Zero-waste dinners
When you are tired and don’t have the energy to figure out what to cook or you have certain ingredients going bad soon, you can add these into a genAI site and ask it to figure out what to make. This allows you to save your own energy (and mental load) and money. It also allows you to lower your food wastage as you use up ingredients before they go bad.
2. Troubleshooting help
You can do this two ways, you can ask it to help you with a problem and be specific about what you want to do and what you want the outcome to be or you can upload online pdf appliance manuals and use the interface to answer questions about settings, problems, or features on specific appliances or tools you have.
3. Creativity and fun
People are using it to create jokes, create memes, many other ways that they can think of to entertain themselves and others. This would be a great place to create Madlibs for a family fun evening or to create a poem about each member of your work team or your family (with limitations of course).
4. Entertaining kids
Speaking of entertaining people, kids can be hard customers for parents, especially during the summer or other school breaks. Using genAI to help you to create stories that kids can have input into (characters, names, places, etc) can keep kids engaged. You could then ask the kids to draw the pictures that go along with that story. It can also be used to create unique colouring pages that you can print out.
5. Planning travel itineraries
When we moved away from using travel agents, we put a great burden on ourselves to figure out all the interesting things we could see and do at different destinations. This can be a fun process, and for those people, I say keep doing it! But if you are already overwhelmed by so many other things, it may be the perfect time to see how genAI does planning a trip itinerary for you. This is the large amounts of data that are easily sifted through by these systems. You can prompt it with a few of the kinds of things that you usually like doing on holidays (and those you are going with) and it can start giving you suggestions within seconds.
6. Healthier living
If you want to give eating healthier or exercising more a try, you can use genAI for help to create personal routines, create a tracker for you to print out or even analyse what you are already doing. This can be helpful if you cannot afford a wellness coach or cannot access one for other reasons.
7. Organise notes
Some people have a lot of notes in their notes apps on their phones. If you are anything like me, they are on a wide variety of topics and are in no order whatsoever. You could upload these to a genAI tool and ask it to organise them. It can also do that for brainstorming sessions that you might have ad at work or on more personal issues. You can also ask follow-up questions about those notes and how they have been organized. Maybe it will have some insights for you?
8. Organise your life
There are so many ways that life can be simplified or outsourced with genAI. But these are the things that you don’t necessarily want to be doing in the first place. It can be a tool for meal planning (similar to #1 but in a proactive way), it can help you to break down big goals (personal or professional) that you have into manageable steps, it can help you plan activities that you will enjoy or to give you ideas on days out that the whole family might enjoy. It can also give you ideas on how to celebrate special or significant events.
9. Self Reflection
This is a use that many are using it for (as you can tell from it ranking the third highest use case). Having it ask you questions that you can answer to dig deeper into the ideas and values that you hold could help you to make better decisions in the future. It could help you to know yourself better. As Aristotle apparently said, “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom”. GenAI is a way to generate the right questions at the right time.
Trying it for yourself
This new technology is big, broad, and everywhere now. For the older generations (me included), genAI is an innovation that most people did not entirely expect to happen in their lifetime. Learning how to use it and make it useful, even in minor ways is necessary if you want to understand how it is changing the world. Whether that is at work or more broadly in society. These are issues that your children will have to navigate, and you cannot help those around you if the basics remain unexplored.
Author
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Pamela Spokes
Specialist, TurbiiniPamela Spokes BA, MA, MBA, AmO. Educator in Service Design and Entrepreneurship with the Turbiini Pre-Incubator Programme in English.
About the author
References
- O’Donnell, J. & Crownhart, C. 2025. We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. Published 20 May 2025. Accessed 5 June 2025.
- Zao-Sanders, M. (2025). 2025 Top-100 Gen AI Use Case Report *UPDATED*. [website] Accessed 20 May 2025.
- Zao-Sanders, M. (2025) How People are Really Using Generative AI Now. Released March 2025. Accessed 20 May 2025. [Report]
